


Blight

by LadyJanelly



Series: homeless!tyler [3]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Homeless, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, M/M, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-08
Updated: 2016-11-09
Packaged: 2018-08-13 21:48:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 35
Words: 85,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7987399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyJanelly/pseuds/LadyJanelly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jamie is twenty, a rookie in the NHL. Tyler is a seventeen year old homeless gay kid. It shouldn't work, but they're doing okay until the Blight sweeps the world, dead people walking, killing, feeding.</p><p>(This is an AU of an AU--see "Sink These Roots" for the original story)<br/>(fic is complete and will be posted on a twice-weekly basis)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, this is an AU of an AU. You'll want to read Sink These Roots first, probably. If you haven't or don't want to, the background is that Tyler is the homeless teen who showed Jamie around Dallas his first night in town. They share a stray puppy that Tyler named Marshall (the puppy is not the Marshall that Tyler would have bought in Boston if he'd gone to the NHL). 
> 
> This doesn't dove-tail perfectly with Sink--everything is a little later in the year than Sink took place, and Jordie isn't in town yet. 
> 
> Fic is completed, and I'll be posting pretty regular.
> 
> If you want a full list of warnings, see the end, but _almost_ everything besides the graphic zombie violence takes place off-screen.

“Are you worried? About the illness in New York, your upcoming game there?” 

The question is for Mike—the media doesn’t bother with guys like Jamie, but he frowns to hear it. He’d heard, on the news, that something was going on, hospitals packed, police working overtime as some weird illness was hitting the population, some of which went wild and attacked people.

He knew it was a thing, but for it to be something big enough to affect hockey, for people to ask about it? He hadn’t been worried about it before. Now he is. He wants to ask, after Mo has sent the reporters off with vague reassurances. He knows the answers though. If management says the game is on, then the game is on, even if half of New York is down with this flu. 

The guys go out after, on the heels of a loss, even though they’re traveling the next morning. Mike tries to get their minds off of it, but Jamie can see he’s not the only one worried.

Tyler is already asleep when Jamie gets home, barely stirs as Jamie slides into bed with him, warm and so fucking sweet in Jamie’s arms. 

==========

They go to New York. The airport is packed when they land, people with more luggage than Jamie has ever seen, piled up at the ticket counters, at the drop-off, clogging the streets as the bus takes the team out. Jamie looks out the window and sees some kind of riot down the street they’re crossing, people running, fighting. 

Cars clog the road; Jamie hasn’t been to Madison Square Garden before, but the other guys comment, how the trip from LaGuardia never takes this long, even the times they’ve hit rush hour. 

The hotel is quiet, once they get inside, and Jamie hangs out with Larsen and Wandell. Tries to catch a newscast to see what’s happening in Dallas, but every channel is focused on a new death in New York, epic traffic situations, a helicopter going down on the East Side. 

“We’re skipping morning skate,” coach says over breakfast the next morning. 

Jamie calls Tyler. 

“Hello?” Tyler sounds like he’s in a crowd, a ruckus of voices around him. 

“Where are you?” Jamie asks, worried suddenly that things have gone bad in Dallas too, that the madness has caught like wildfire.

“Grocery store,” Tyler says, distracted. “There’s. I don’t know. I ran into the neighbors on the way to walk Marshall this morning, and they asked if I had supplies yet. Asked if we were evacuating.”

“Evacuating?” Jamie feels his stomach go sideways. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” Tyler says, like he doesn’t understand. “I’m probably. Probably over-reacting. Just. The way people are being is freaking me out.”

Jamie grits his teeth. There’s nothing he can do from here. No way to get home before the team’s plane takes him back.

“I’ll be home tomorrow night,” he says. Hopes to god it’s true. “Get. Get whatever makes you feel better to have. I don’t know. Whatever. There’s some more cash in my sock drawer.” Keeping so much cash on hand was never a habit before Tyler. Jamie is glad of it now.

“I already…” Tyler starts, sounding guilty, but Jamie cuts him off.

“That’s fine. That’s good. Don’t forget dog food.”

“Got it,” Tyler says. “I’m. I gotta go.”

The connection breaks halfway through Jamie’s “I love you,” and he figures it’s for the best, to not say the words now, under stress. That it’ll be fine, and he can say them some other time.

He stares at the phone for a while, and then dials home. Talks to his parents. Lets them know he’s in New York, but he’s fine. Everything is under control. The team is taking care of its players. They are valuable commodities; the team will make sure they stay safe. “Maybe…maybe Jordie should wait a week before he comes down,” he says before he hangs up. He knows this is Jordie’s shot, that it’s not easy to tell a team no. 

Game-time comes and Jamie gets into his suit. A call comes on the hotel phone, one of the assistant coaches saying “Bring your suitcase down with you; it looks like we aren’t coming back here after the game.”

It’s dark out when they leave the hotel, traffic snarled. Coach is on the phone, and the men are quiet in their seats. 

“Game’s off!” Coach finally says. “Our equipment guys are heading for the airport. We’re heading back to Dallas.”

Jamie can’t even imagine the cost in scrapping a regular-season game in a market like New York, what the penalty for a forfeit is. 

“Hold on, everybody!” the bus driver shouts, and Jamie does as the bus hops a curb, goes bumper-to-bumper with a pickup truck that won’t or can’t get out of their way. 

Jamie tries to call Tyler again when they’re sitting on the tarmac, waiting for their turn to take off, but the network is overloaded, and the call won’t go through. He sends a text instead, just a quick _team heading back to dallas see you soon_. Hopes the smaller data-use will get the message out.

There’s no reply by the time they take off, one of the last planes to make it out of the city.

=============

Landing in Dallas is a serious deja vu moment. The atmosphere, the crush of traffic towards the airport, towards the suburbs, it’s like New York was thirty-six hours earlier. The team’s shuttle takes them back to their vehicles, the airport’s streetlights glowing on the underside of low-hanging cloud-cover.

“Go home, practice tomorrow is canceled,” Coach tells them as they’re getting off the bus. “Things should settle down in a day or two. We’ll be in touch.”

Jamie calls Tyler again as he’s waiting in traffic. The phone rings but Tyler doesn’t answer. 

Jamie considers the road’s shoulder, the clearance of his truck’s undercarriage. Fuck it. He turns the wheel and gravel crunches under his tires. Grateful for those days spent looking for Tyler when he’s forced off onto smaller and smaller side-streets for the sake of moving forward at all. 

He gets home, pulls up into the parking garage. There are a lot of cars missing, about half as many as usual this time of day, this time of week. 

A neighbor runs into him in the corridor between the fourth floor of the garage and his apartment door, arms piled high with laundry baskets of clothes topped with a cardboard box of food.

“Sorry,” Jamie says, but the dude doesn’t even look at him.

He opens the apartment door and hears Marshall whining. He steps into the smell of dogshit and nearly gags. There’s a grocery store shopping cart just inside the door of his apartment, loaded high with loose stuff, jars and cans, toilet paper and water bottles. He pushes past, following the sound of those insistent whimpers. At first he thinks Marshall’s cage is knocked over, but it’s just moved, blocking one end of the kitchen, the coffee table on its side to close off the area. The island is covered with shopping bags, four big bags of dog food on the floor nearby. Apparently Tyler was even more freaked out than he had admitted. 

Jamie dodges the piles and goes to Marshall, scoops her up. The floor between the island and the rest of the kitchen is covered with newspapers; a count of the shit-piles makes him think she’s been here all day.

He’s not sure if it’s the stench or worry that makes his stomach roil. God, Tyler wouldn’t have done this to her without a damn good reason. Would have taken her with him if he thought with-him was safer than this. 

Marshall wriggles in his arms as he gets her leash on. It’s warm out, but he opens the doors to their useless little Juliet balcony anyway. He pulls out his phone and dials as he heads for the stairs, unwilling to lose connection in the elevator if he actually gets hold of Tyler.

This time, the call goes straight to voice-mail. Shit. Shit shit shit.


	2. Chapter 2

Tyler is making his fourth trip from the grocery store to the apartment, pushing a cart loaded with twice his body-weight in groceries, water, canned goods, anything they had left. The first three trips, there had been a cashier, and he’d thrown some of Jamie’s money at her and gone through. 

The last trip, the cashiers were leaving, some manager yelling at people to get out of the store, at his employees to get back to work. He’d yelled at Tyler when he pushed the cartload out, but Tyler kept his hand on Jamie’s baseball bat and stared him down, and they guy hadn’t had the nerve to put hands on him. There were enough people going in and out that he thinks the manager won’t be able to get the doors closed and locked. Not much was left, but if everybody is being this frantic, Tyler feels like it couldn’t hurt to stockpile a little more. 

The street outside is clogged with traffic, drivers laying on their horns, trying to force the rest to move by sheer volume. Tyler gets the cart off of the curb, but the crosswalk is full. Has to cut between cars, up the middle of the street for a bit, until someone is a little slow closing a gap and he gets to the other side. He pushes the cart up to the apartment doors, clickers through the pedestrian gate. The wheels squeak as he makes his way down the hall to the elevator.

He gets out of the elevator, and his phone rings on his way to the door. Not-Jamie. A local number he doesn’t recognize.

“Yeah?” he asks, mentally ticking off the people who it won’t be. Not Ashleigh or Ava, they’ve got their own phones. Not Jamie. 

“Tyler?” The voice is familiar, even scrambled by background noise, cars honking, someone shouting.

“Eduardo?” Tyler tucks the phone against his shoulder and gets the door open, drags the cart inside. Marshall has already shit in the makeshift pen he built.

“Tyler, is there any way we can get a ride? We went to pick Dion’s brother up at school. We got him. We’re trying to get back to Oak Lawn and got stuck down by Deep Ellum.” Eduardo sounds wrecked. Panicked. Tyler’s never heard him that way.

“This guy, Tyler, this fucking guy in a SUV. He just jumped the curb. He hit Dion. He’s okay, but he can’t walk and me an’ Darius can’t carry him. We’re in that beach-theme bar. It was open. Nobody was there.”

Tyler draws a map in his head, barely five miles from him to them. Except there’s that big fancy new hospital between them and the relative safety of a neighborhood they know, and the tv has been saying not to go to the hospitals, that there’s sick people there. Most of downtown if they go that way, all those buildings full of people evacuating. It’s gotta be a mess, even worse than here.

“I’ll come,” Tyler says. Shit. He needs. Something to move Dion in. Not like he has a freakin’ wheelchair. He starts unloading the shopping cart, before he realizes that’s dumb, that there were plenty just like it, bright red plastic things, cluttering up the parking lot of the grocery store. “I’m on my way. Just stay out of trouble. If you get kicked out of the bar, just keep as close to it as you can.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, and Tyler isn’t sure he deserves the amount of relief in his voice. “Yeah. Thanks. Tyler. We owe you. We owe you so fucking much.”

“I haven’t done anything, yet,” he says as he grabs the baseball bat off of the cart, makes sure Marshall is still secure. Steps out the door and locks it behind him.

And then he runs. Down the stairs, through the tangle of cars that clog the street. There are still carts, and he grabs one. It’s five miles on the most direct roads, but he doesn’t trust those. He charts a map in his head as he jogs, the cart bouncing and rattling over every crack in the sidewalk. Down Lemmon and across 75. Up the back-way. Try to cut between the hospital and downtown, or if he gets really fucked, loop around the hospital and come at Deep Ellum the long way around. Maybe eight miles, if he’s lucky. He’s a fit young dude though. He’s used to walking. 

He can do this.

===============

Traffic gets worse, the closer Tyler gets to downtown. It’s getting dark, getting cooler. Headlights blind him as he walks. 75 is a river of red taillights heading north, headlights heading south. None of it moving at all, small pockets of dark where cars have bashed each other’s lights out. 

He should have brought water. 

He should have brought a flashlight.

He wishes Jamie was here. 

He is so, so glad Jamie is somewhere else, with his team, somewhere safe.

The sound of an engine revving is his only warning, and a big white truck breaks from traffic, jumps the curb and crashes into the wall just a few feet ahead of his cart. Bricks pour down on the hood. There’s some sort of fight inside, blood splashing the windows. Smearing with strands of hair as someone’s head hits the glass.

Tyler’s heart pounds and he wrestles the cart off of the curb and around the truck’s back bumper. Swallows hard against the urge to barf. Tells himself that he’s not equipped to get in the middle of whatever was going on in there. That with so much blood, whoever was on the losing side of that fight was already dead. He’s gotta get to Dion and Eduardo. Gotta help them. 

============

Two kids stand in a doorway, out of the flow of foot-traffic. Twelve and fifteen, maybe. Blond. Boys. Dressed nice. Wide-eyed and terrified. 

_Not my problem_ Tyler tells himself. Walks past. Gets maybe ten feet down the sidewalk before he has to stop. Go back.

“Hey!” he says, and the biggest one startles. “Hey, you gotta keep moving. What are you doing here?”

“We don’t. Don’t know where to go,” the older one says. “We were. Dad said we were gonna go get mom from the hospital, but there was. This crazy guy just started biting people. People were screaming. Running. Dad told us to go. Told me to take care of Casey. He fell. Dad. In the running. We got out but I don’t know where to go.”

Tyler pinches his eyes shut. The mental chant of _Not my problem_ doesn’t seem to be making it true. Fuck.

“Look. I’m heading for my friends. They need me. Need my help. Right now. I gotta do that.” The little one’s lower lip wobbles. Fuck. “But if you come with me, we’ll go together and get my friends, and then I got somewhere to go. It’s pretty safe, and there’s stuff there. You can wait there until you get hold of your dad.”

The big one only hesitates for a second, and then he nods. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thanks.”

They fall in beside him. “I’m Cameron,” the oldest says. “That’s Casey.”

Siblings with C-names, just like Tyler’s sisters. He wonders if the weirdness has gotten that far. If they’re safe or scared. If someone is taking care of them if his parents can’t.

Cameron grabs the front corner of the cart, helps Tyler keep it on-track and from jumping so much.

“Tyler,” he says. It’s full-on dark now, the streetlights reflecting off of the low cloud cover, making the whole world feel like it’s just some bad dream. At the corner of a gated parking lot, he can see the shape of three people in scrubs, milling aimlessly. Their body language is wrong, purposeless. Restless.

Cameron managing the front of the cart actually lets Tyler make better time. The streets are clearing out. People getting away. Getting to somewhere else. Maybe there were less people living right here when it happened, the hospital block behind them and Deep Ellum, clubs and shops and restaurants, ahead of them.

“There,” Tyler says, nodding towards the tropical themed bar, faux beach grass hanging down from the aluminum awning, the windows painted with a coral reef filled with bright fish.

He leaves the boys and the cart on the curb, takes the bat. Sticks his head through the door. 

“Psst! Eduardo!” 

Eduardo pops up from behind the bar, followed by a skinny little black kid, probably younger than Casey. 

“Tyler! Jesus, we thought you’d ditched us.”

Tyler shakes his head. 

“Whole city’s lost its god-damn mind,” Tyler says. Ducks back out and brings the cart and the boys in with him. 

He goes around the end of the bar, and Dion. Dion doesn’t look good. Ashy and sweaty. His leg braced out awkwardly. 

“Shit,” Tyler breathes. “You think it’s broke?”

Dion shakes his head. Doesn’t look convinced. 

Someone outside smacks into one of the windows, just walks straight into it and then bounces off, a vague shadow through the paint, and everyone inside jumps.

“I want to go home,” Casey whimpers. 

“Yeah, me too,” Tyler breathes. He needs a plan. Needs to get everybody back to Jamie’s. He needs time to fucking think.

He makes some introductions, gets himself a bottle of water and tosses another pair over to Cameron. He’d thought to put Dion in the shopping cart, but now he doesn’t think he’ll make it like that, doesn’t think he’ll be able to fold up without being in agony. The way Eduardo is looking at the cart, he knows it too.

“So. How much of a rush are we in getting out of here?” Tyler asks. Now that he’s stopped moving, running seems a little less urgent. 

Nobody answers him.

“I mean. Can we stay until morning? Let traffic thin out some more. See if we can find some tools or something, to make the cart easier for Dion. Maybe…” 

“We gotta go find our dad,” Cameron says, and Tyler winces. 

“I’m not gonna stop you,” he says, “but wouldn’t it be better to stick together?”

Cameron runs his hands through his hair, paces back and forth, looks to Casey like the younger kid will help him make up his mind.

“Okay. Okay, we’ll stay with you guys.”

“We’ll get you home,” Tyler promises. “We just gotta be smart, yeah?”

Cameron nods. 

“Watch the front,” Tyler says, and then heads to the door marked “Employees only.” There has to be something. Maybe a dolly. Something with wheels. Something useful.

His phone pings, four times in quick succession. Texts from Jamie.

_Home_

_Where are you?_

_You okay?_

_Tyler shit please let me knwo where you are_

The time on the messages seems weird, and when Tyler looks, they were sent about an hour before he got them. Shit. He wants. Jesus, he wants to call Jamie. Tell him to bring the truck and pick them up. 

_I’m okay_

_With D and E_

_Stay put_

_I’m heading back there_

__

He shuts off the screen and puts his phone back in his pocket. Clenches his teeth. Jamie is home. He just has to get everyone back there and it’ll all be alright.


	3. Chapter 3

Jamie carries Marshall down the stairs, poop-bag and the end of her leash in his hand. She squirms, whimpers and whines and he thinks she’s been trying to hold it instead of freely shitting in the apartment, and she’s really gotta go, so he hurries down the stairs. 

He puts her down as soon as they get to the ground floor. Usually she’d sniff around, checking out where the other dogs have been on her way to the grassy patch where she does her business.

This time, she sticks close to Jamie, under his feet, almost tripping him as he checks his phone, desperate for any news, any reply from Tyler at all. He tries to think why the fuck Tyler would have left, where he would have gone. If he has any chance in hell of finding Tyler if he leaves the apartment and goes after him. 

A quick, desperate yank on the leash jerks Jamie’s attention back to Marshall. She whines, frantic, trying to drag him back to the gate, back to the stairs. 

“The hell?” he wonders, frowning. He sees movement out of the corner of his eye, in the direction Marshall is trying to pull away from, and he turns.

There’s a woman coming up the opposite sidewalk. Pale blouse stained dark at the collar, slim red knee-length skirt. 

The woman is wrong. 

The way she walks, slow shuffling steps. 

The way she holds her head, tipped down, long blond hair covering her face.

No purse.

No fucking _shoes._

“Ma’am? Are you okay?” Jamie asks, and her next step turns her in his direction. Two more and she’s at the curb. She steps off, and one foot slips into the slanting edge of the storm drain. 

“Shit!” Jamie can hear the wet-snap sound of bones breaking from the other side of the street. He snatches Marshall up and strides over.

The woman doesn’t scream. Doesn’t react to the pain at all. Her hips writhe as she tries to keep walking, even though she’s on the ground, even though she needs a fucking ambulance. 

She lifts her face, and half her cheek is missing, ripped down to the bone, teeth and jaw visible through the gap. Her eyes are cloudy, like they’re covered with cataracts. She opens her mouth, snaps her teeth even though she’s still yards away. 

Marshall yowls in terror, scratching Jamie’s arms and chest as she tries to struggle out of his arms, to run. 

Jamie stumbles back. Trying to make sense of what he’s seeing and failing.

The flu. The flu does not do this. 

He can’t.

He has to do. Do something.

Fuck.

A hand lands on his shoulder and he turns. A man. His eyes milky and vacant. His hands grabbing for Jamie, grabbing for Marshall. 

Jamie hits him with his free hand. Punches him, hard. Feels the surge of adrenaline released on a target. 

The guy falls, knocked back and off balance. Most people Jamie has fought, most _people_ would take a second. Figure out if they’re hurt bad, before getting up.

This guy doesn’t even bother, turns and crawls after Jamie.

The woman from the drain drags herself forward on her arms, her leg a twisted ruin behind her. 

Jamie runs. Back to the apartment gate, clicking the key-fob desperately to open the lock.

He slams it behind himself just as a third one of the dead-eyed-people crashes into the grate. He falls back, until the wall catches him. The man on the other side reaches his arm through, grasps for Jamie, his fingertips scraped down to the bone. Pushes the bars until Jamie is sure he’ll break his collar bone.

Jamie backs up. Clutches Marshall to his chest.

He’s shaking. 

Heart pounding so hard he can’t hear himself think.

Tyler. Tyler is out. Tyler is out in that. 

Tyler. Is going to have to go _through_ that to get home.

The fear falls away, firms into resolve. He can’t go get Tyler. His chances of finding him are even slimmer in this mess. But he is pretty damn sure Tyler will be back. If only because, now especially, Jamie has a safe harbor to offer. Tyler stockpiled them groceries, he planned for Marshall to get fed. He won’t _stay_ gone.

If all Jamie can do is clear the way, he’ll clear the way.

He jogs back up the stairs, Marshall held close. Back into the apartment, looking for the baseball bat he left in case the pushy neighbor made more than a pest of himself.

He searches the whole apartment, under the new piles of groceries. In the closet. Everywhere. 

The bat is gone. Tyler must have it. Jamie is glad, that he’s not walking around without something to protect himself.

His phone chimes. 

Tyler, texting to say he’s coming home.

 _be careful_ Jamie sends back.

_the sick people are dangerous_

He stares at the phone, wondering if that was an understatement. 

_really dangerous_

A little red exclamation mark appears by the words.

Text not sent.

He starts looking, for something else to use as a weapon. 

Something to clear the way.

===========


	4. Chapter 4

Tyler cracks the bar’s door open. Looks through the gap. There are still people on the street, moving purposefully one direction or another. Single people, and small groups of friends or families. A few. Not nearly as many as there had been before. From here, he can see the overpass where 75 turns into I45. A semi-truck cab is halfway through the cement side-barrier, one wheel spinning in space, lit by the artful up-lighting on the architecture. The people must be filtering out of the traffic jam on foot. Scattering for some reason.

He looks back at his guys. Eduardo had found a tool box, a small hand-saw inside. They’d used it to cut down the plastic grid of the cart at the front. Tyler and Cameron popped the top shelf off of a rack in the back room, and they put it in the floor of the cart, wired it down to give Dion’s leg room to stretch out flat, supported. Darius hovers by his big brother like he wants to be useful but is too afraid of hurting him to touch him.

Dion looks pained, even though they tore apart one of the booth seats to make him some padding. It’s gonna be a horrible trip for Dion, and Tyler wonders again, if they shouldn’t wait here. 

There is a distant squeal-crunch of a vehicle hitting something solid, a muffled explosion. 

He twists his grip on Jamie’s baseball bat. 

“Time to go,” Dion says, and Tyler nods. Steps through and holds the door so Cameron and Eduardo can push the cart out, Casey steadying the front to keep it on track as it bounces across the threshold. 

They move, Tyler taking the first turn in the front, Dion trying not to complain as they jostle him going down a curb, across a pothole-riddled street. An orange glow lights behind them. Tyler looks over his shoulder as he walks, sees the light flicker and flow, smells wood burning, the smell of charring meat. 

“Can we go any faster?” he asks, circles around to grab the other front-corner. He’s the biggest of them, with Dion down. 

Casey stumbles, trips and catches himself with his grip on the cart. “I’m okay,” he says, back on his feet. 

Some crusty old gutter-lump comes down an abandoned cross-street, limping crookedly towards them. Right towards them, coming up on Casey and Eduardo’s side of the cart. 

“Hey!” Tyler says when the dude gets too close for comfort. “Hey, fuck off!”

Dude doesn’t slow, doesn’t even pause. He reaches out, grabs onto Casey’s arm.

The cart stops and Tyler darts around. Swings on the hobo, catches him on the upper arm with a meaty thwack. The guy should back off, Tyler thinks. Should stop and evaluate the threat, should fucking look at the guy with the weapon.

Casey screams, and the bum draws him in, head dipping down as he sinks his ratty teeth into the boy’s neck and shoulder. 

“Get the fuck off of him!” Tyler yells, hits him in the spine, once and again. Cameron is in the fucking way, trying to get his brother away from the guy, blood on his hands, on his t-shirt, on his face. Dion has Darius by the wrist, and Tyler isn’t sure if he’s trying to keep him from running into the fight or running away. 

The space opens up and Tyler swings, all of his strength in the blow, catches the son of a bitch in the back of the head and his skull just shatters, goes to pieces like a watermelon hit with a mac truck. 

Casey coughs, gasping air in through the hole in his neck as much as his nose and mouth. Tyler steps back, tries not to puke. Oh shit. Oh shit.

“We gotta move,” Dion says. Doesn’t let go of Darius.

Tyler watches the gore drip off of the bat and onto the cement.

“Tyler!” Dion hisses. Tyler looks up, follows Dion’s gaze to where some grunge-band reject is shuffling their way, dripping blood from the ragged end of his handless left arm. 

Eduardo moves the cart, desperation giving him strength but not control, and it tips, would fall without Tyler grabbing the end. 

“Cameron!” Tyler calls, and the monster tips his head like he heard that. Starts to shuffle in their direction. “We gotta go. Now.”

“He’s dead,” Cameron whimpers. “Oh god, he’s dead. Dad said. Said to take care of him. Oh shit I’m in so much trouble.” 

Tyler reaches back, grabs his shirt, sticky and red with his brother’s blood. 

“Move,” Tyler orders, drags him forward so he can get hold on the cart again. “You move or we’re leaving you, do you understand?”

Cameron nods, sobs brokenly as he walks. 

They turn a corner, and there are five of _them_ in the next street, standing between the traffic-trapped cars, milling aimlessly.

“Shit!” Tyler whispers. “Back. Go back.”

They pull the cart back, and the dude in plaid is too close for Tyler’s comfort now. He steps away from the group, and the dude turns to follow him. It’s not easy, to pull his arm back. To swing on a person. His first hit is off-target. Catches the guy in his shoulder. They both stumble from the force of it, but Tyler catches his balance faster than the dead guy. He steps into the second swing, and the bat sinks into the guy’s skull, hits with enough force that blood bursts from his eye sockets, from his nose and ears. 

He goes down. Stays the fuck down.

“This way,” Tyler whispers, takes them through a vacant lot between two buildings. 

“Casey!” Cameron calls, too loud, too fucking loud. 

“Oh no, oh hell no,” Dion says. Eduardo prays in Spanish.

Tyler turns, and Casey is shuffling after them, his head lolling oddly, the tendons in his throat ripped out by the bite. 

“Casey!” Cameron says again, his voice radiating relief. “I thought you were dead! We thought you were dead!”

“Cameron, no!” Dion snaps, but it’s too late, too late for Tyler to grab him as he runs by. Runs to Casey, wraps him in his arms.

Tyler takes two steps after him, and then the screaming starts, wet and ugly. He can’t process it. Can’t figure out what the hell he should do. Cameron jerks, struggles, but Casey has him, thin arms holding like a python around his neck.

“Tyler!” Eduardo calls. “Tyler, we gotta go. You gotta help us.” 

Darius whines with every breath, like he can’t catch air without letting out the overflow of fear.

“Come on,” Tyler says, makes himself turn away from the sight of Casey eating Cameron’s face. “Darius, grab that side. I think I know where we might find a truck…”

 

==============


	5. Chapter 5

The shower-curtain rod is spring-loaded, but when Jamie twists it down to it’s shortest length, it becomes four feet of double-thick brushed-chrome-finished stainless steel pipe. More heft than a hockey stick, it feels weird in his hands. He wishes that he had his gear here, that he could go out in helmet and pads, but he got too used to the big bin for used gear in the middle of the locker room, equipment guys to take it all away and return it clean and fresh-ish smelling. There was no reason to have that stuff at his house.

He turns on the TV as he’s getting ready to go out. Pauses and listens to the reporter. “Police are advising all people to stay in their homes. Avoid crowds. Avoid unnecessary travel. Avoid hospitals and medical centers.” It runs for about ninety seconds, and then starts over.

He wonders how long it’s been since a living person was at the station. 

His gear is not-here, maybe still on the plane, but he’s got tape, so he carefully wraps his wrists, and then his knuckles. Twists a long spiral wrap down the length of the curtain rod. He’s about to go hit people until they stop moving. It could get…slippery.

He watches the list of warnings a fourth time, waiting for it to change, hoping it will change. He realizes he’s stalling. That Tyler is out in this shit and doesn’t have that luxury. Marshall whines, and he gives her some more food. It doesn’t seem to soothe her at all.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he says. “I gotta go downstairs and wait for Tyler, okay?”

She cocks her ears and paces circles in her pen. Not-okay, obviously, but there’s nothing more he can do.

He grabs a Gatorade and a couple protein bars and heads back down the stairs, not quite trusting the elevator. He tries to plan as he goes down. Tries to figure out where he could be most-useful, what the weaknesses of the building are. He had thought Texas apartments were really strange, when the real-estate agent had been showing him around. He’d never seen anything like it, but she’d acted like it was pretty standard for an apartment in the price-range he was willing to risk in case he got sent down to the AHL. 

Now, he’s grateful for weird-ass Texas construction ideas. The complex is five stories high, a ring of outward-facing apartments, each one with a view of some part of the city. The central core is filled with a six-story parking garage, each level of it attached to the same level of apartments by a short walkway that leads into the interior corridors. The garage is secured at ground level by a horizontally-opening gate that takes a remote clicker to get into. The corridors on each level lead to the individual apartment doors and from there, there are two stairways down, at the north and south sides. At the bottom, there is a gate on each end that secures the corridors from the sidewalk beyond, also requiring a clicker to open from the outside.

Unless Tyler magically acquired a vehicle somehow, he’ll be coming through one of the pedestrian gates. It’s a toss up which, so Jamie heads back to the one he took Marshall out of before, the one where he has a vague idea what to expect. 

The dead-guy from earlier is still near the gate, turns at the sound of Jamie’s boots on the stairs. 

“Hey!” Jamie challenges, and the thing hisses, reaches through the bars again.

“Get outta here,” Jamie orders. “I’m not fucking around.”

He hadn’t thought it would work, but the utter lack of comprehension makes it easy to stick his pole through the grate, thump the man in the chest. He falls back, writhes around until he gets his hands under him again. Pushes up and comes back to the gate.

Jamie clenches his jaw. Shit. This could be harder than he thought. He hits again, and the thump has more give to it, like he’s hitting pre-broken ribs, a place where the man’s body is softer than it should be. 

He needs. Fuck. Needs to take this guy apart, or needs to find a place to hit where he won’t get up again.

He waits for the creature to get back up. Slower this time, lop-sided. Jamie feels ill. 

He just. Needs to kill it. He tells himself there’s no way that this can be a person again. It’s not murder. It’s not even like killing a dangerous animal. 

He braces and hits, puts muscle and weight both into it, and the pole punches two inches into the middle of the guy’s sternum. It grunts, and stumbles, but doesn’t even go down. 

“God damnit, god damnit,” Jamie says like a mantra, hits again and again.

The pole catches the cross-bar on the gate’s grid and angles up, and the human skull just isn’t that soft, isn’t that fragile, but it crushes in anyway, and the dead guy falls, goes down and stay still. 

Jamie steps back, breathing heavy. The stench of death is thick in his mouth and he takes a sip of his Gatorade to wash it out. 

Another one is there when he’s done, vacant eyes and grasping fingers. 

_Okay,_ he thinks. _Let’s do this._

=============

Six of the things slump against the gate. The head-shot seems to be a dependable success. More are shambling over, drawn by the activity, but Jamie has the gate between him and them. 

The phone in his pocket chirps and he puts down his improvised weapon to check messages.

It’s a mass group-text. Looks like it went to the entire team. 

_EVACUATION: Love Field, 8am, chartered plane, families and girlfriends only_

Jamie stares at it. Checks the time. Texts are coming through as soon as they’re sent now. The one warning Tyler has gone out.

It’s six in the morning, the sky just starting to lighten. 

He thumbs back to his conversation with Tyler.

_team is leaving_

_how soon can you get back here?_

_I’ll get you on the plane_

_Lov field at 8_

_I’l take you with me_

_Can you get here??_

__

This one goes out, and Jamie has to think of how many people had to have stopped using their phones for service to be working again.

He stares at the screen. Waiting. Waiting for Tyler to reply. Trying not to wonder why he isn’t.

Motion outside catches his attention again. Another wave of the things are passing the open patch of street he can see from the gate to the stairs. He stuffs his phone back in his pocket, taps the bars with his pole until the first two turn his way. 

They go down, without a whimper, without trying to shield themselves from the blow. 

He looks over the corpses, and there are four more, two heading vaguely his way, two more shuffling along the sidewalk.

He’s not sure why he pauses, why he looks closer. They are (were) women. He can’t see their faces to guess an age, and their body language doesn’t help any. They’re walking like every other one he’s seen. Head hung low, slow dragging steps. Like they’re expending the barest energy to move forward. He watches, trying to figure out what is wrong, what doesn’t fit. 

They’re holding hands. Moving with the flow of the dead-things. One of them tips her head, just a fraction, meets Jamie’s eyes through her hair. Her eyes are wide with terror, despite her slow plodding steps. He gets it, in an instant, that they hadn’t known he was there, and now they’re too far past to change direction without the real monsters noticing them. They won’t be able to climb over the barricade of bodies he’s made before others could be on them.

“Keep going!” he says, hopes it’s loud enough to get to them. “I’ll meet you on the other side. Let you in.”

One nods, a slow up and down bob of her head.

Jamie stabs the dead-guy in front of him through the eye, taking the entire socket and part of his forehead with it. He jabs another one, knocks it back but didn’t get enough force to damage the brain. He tries to calculate how long it’s been. How long it would take to walk around to the parking garage gate. He heads down the corridor that way, pulls the key-fob out of his pocket. 

The women are just coming past, and he hits the button. 

A week ago, he’d been sitting in his truck, in this exact spot, watching the slow rattle of the gate opening, pulling open from the side, rolling on its tracks. He’d been wishing it was faster, or that there wasn’t a gate there at all. 

Now, every second it takes to get open is another of _them_ that can get through, another one he will have to fight, to kill. The noise of it catches the walkers’ attention before its even open, and the first one pushes through when there’s less than a foot of space clear. He starts up near the gate, and when there are too many, when they’ve got the man-advantage, he retreats a few steps. He draws the quicker-moving one in, keeps it between him and the rest. Kills the fastest ones and then picks off the stragglers. 

He sees the women come in, still moving slow. They angle their path around him, up the ramp. Behind him and safe. Now all he has to do is hold the dead back. Keep them from getting past him.

The gate is open for so long Jamie is afraid that _now_ is the time the power has chosen to go down.

He smashes the skull of a middle-age man, and a teenage girl. A guy in scrubs and another in tight club-clothes. 

Finally, fucking finally, the motor kicks in and the chain rattles, the gap closing. There’s twenty or more now, and he backs up further, drawing them out, making them come at him one at a time. He hits the second floor, and there are only three. He’s sweating. Shaking from exertion, from adrenaline running out. He stumbles, goes down on one knee, and then one of the women is there, using a messenger bag to protect her from the creature’s teeth, shoving the bag against it’s face, pushing it back. 

The floor is still angled, and the woman is more agile than the dead guy. He goes back and she lands on top of him, a weird strangled scream coming from between her teeth. The monster claws at her, tries to sit up and she pounds him back down with her bag, blood on her face, on her bare arms. Twice and a third time, and then his head makes a sound like an empty helmet hitting the ice and his brains splatter all around him.

She’s crying. She’s crying and the other woman is sitting on the ground across from her, knees up against her chest. 

“Hey,” Jamie calls, and for once doesn’t feel embarrassed by how soft his voice is. “Are you okay? I mean…” 

The one with the bag nods, stiff and jerky, like she’s forgotten already how to move like the living. 

“Come on. My apartment is here. I need…”

He remembers the phone, the conversation he’d been having with Tyler. He pulls it out and checks.

_coming_ Tyler’s reply reads. And then:

_not fast enough_

_wont make it in time_

_go_

_take marsh_

_go jamie_

Jamie reads the message through twice. Tries to imagine getting on that plane without Tyler. Imagines leaving him here. One of the women is calling him, waving her hand in front of him.

If he tells Tyler the truth, that he won’t leave without him, there’s a chance Tyler will rush. That he’ll try to get Jamie to that plane. He needs the right words. To get Tyler home safe. To get him here.

_cant bring marsh out in this_

_too loud_

_not safe_

_tyler_

Fuck, Tyler already probably knows this. 

_they follow sound_

_they dn’t attac each oter_

_saw some girls moving like them_

_made it through_

_be careful_

_be safe_

_msrsh is safe_

He wants to keep talking forever. To wait for Tyler’s response no matter how long it takes. 

He can’t do that though. Can’t be a distraction. Besides, he has other jobs to do. Has to pull his weight. 

He sends a text to the Stars player’s group. 

_cant make it_

_in a secure place_

_if you get stuck you can come her_

_here_

He adds the apartment name and the cross-streets. Hopes that’s enough if one of the guys needs it.

He looks up from his phone. The two women look shell-shocked, probably around his own age, maybe younger. Streaked makeup and wide eyes. “Hey,” he says. “I live here. If you want to come up, get cleaned up…” He gestures to the scratches the one took saving his ass. 

They look to each other. He guesses rules about going into strange men’s apartments still matter, even in the middle of the apocalypse. 

“Okay,” says the one with curly hair, darker skin. “I’m Nikki, this is Kara…”


	6. Chapter 6

The white truck is where Tyler saw it last, its front grill embedded in the wall, engine still idling. The driver’s side door is open, the blood on the window dried to a tacky maroon crust. Whoever had been inside isn’t there now.

A couple of the dead-people mill around. A really huge guy with his shoulder chewed open, a woman in a maid’s uniform from one of the hotels, a couple more that don’t really have anything special about them.

Just a few, but it seems like more when those are the people Tyler has to put down while Eduardo and Darius try to get Dion into the truck. 

“We need to keep the cart,” Tyler whispers as him and Eduardo peer around the corner at the scene. “In case we need it later.”

Eduardo licks his lips, dry and cracked. They should have brought more water out of the bar. Should have grabbed the bags of bar nuts and pretzels from under the counter. They’re acclimated to hunger, though. To pushing through until they get their next meal, their next safe place to sleep. 

“I think I can get Dion in the front by myself,” Eduardo says. “But the tailgate probably locks, on a truck like that, so I’ll need you to help me get the cart in the back.”

“You guys go in the passenger side. Darius, I need you to crawl over and shut the driver’s door so none of them can get in. I’ll take down as many as I can and then come back once Dion’s in. Me and Eduardo boost it over and then we’ll get outta here.”

“You gotta drive,” Eduardo says, and Tyler winces. He’d kind of forgotten that Dion is in no shape, and Eduardo never has. 

“We all gotta get into that truck, and then we can fuck around with who’s sitting where.” It’s a king-cab. There should be plenty of room.

Tyler takes a few focusing breaths. This is the epitome of looking for trouble, and he has not made it on his own for this long by looking for trouble. He just can’t see any other way. Either he fights these corpses for the truck, or he fights them to get through to the other side, or they say fuck it and head back to the bar and starve in two days while the truck runs out of gas or someone else takes it.

It all runs around in a circle, and all ends with Tyler bashing the brains out of some dead guys or standing by while Dion and Eduardo and Darius die. 

“Fuck it,” he hisses, and steps forward, sneaking up quiet on the closest one, the big dude with his back to them. 

_Ting!_ his phone chirps and he has a full-body spasm of oh-shit horror. _Ting! Ting! Ting!_

The big dude turns around and Tyler swings. Thunks the bat into his meaty head but it barely moves with the blow. 

“Shit shit shit!” he hits from the side again, and then straight down. Finally the guy goes down, collapsing to his knees and then flopping forward. 

Tyler dances back to get out of the way, and the rest are heading his way, too many, gonna gang up on him, gonna take down Eduardo. 

There’s a parked Civic on the other side of the two-lane road, and he ducks between two of the dead, climbs quick up onto the hood and then the roof of the car. It’s not so hard, to hit down on them, to break their grasping arms, to smash their skulls. His phone chirps, again, but he has nowhere near the time to look at it. He barely has time to glance at the truck, to see the driver’s door is closed, Dion inside. Eduardo has the cart by the bed, but there’s no way he’ll be able to lift it alone. 

And there are Deads between Tyler and them, and more coming. 

Darius opens the back door and hands something to Eduardo, and then Tyler has brains he needs to smash so he doesn’t know what it is. 

He thinks they’re fucked, that he’s not gonna be able to get back. That nobody else can drive.

The gunshot cuts over the moans of the dead, blows out the front windshield of the car Tyler’s standing on. He can feel the impact through the soles of his shoes and he nearly falls off the car in surprise.

Eduardo looks pained--at the sound or the kick or nearly killing Tyler, Tyler isn’t sure--but he gets the barrel of the enormous handgun back down, steps in closer to the nearest dead and fires again, spattering its brains out the back of its head. 

The rest turn towards the noise, and Tyler hits one as he jumps off of the car, his full weight in the blow, taking it down. Knocks another sideways as he goes, not sure if it’s down for good or just down.

And then him and Eduardo are running for the truck, scurrying around the far side. They heft the cart up into the back, and for a second Tyler is sure it will bounce off of the tool box and out again, but it falls in and flat. Eduardo is in, trying to make room, and Tyler just climbs into his lap and slams the door shut. 

The stench inside is overwhelming, shit and death and puke, even with all the windows cracked. The seat is wet when Tyler slithers over the center console and lands in the driver’s seat. He puts his foot on the brake and reaches to put it in reverse and “What the fuck is this?” 

Stick-shift. The fucking truck is stick.

“You got this,” Dion says, low and calm. “You clutch when I say clutch. I’ll shift.” 

The dead are starting to thump against the side, greedy fingers pressing into the gaps in the windows. 

“You ready?” Dion asks, and Tyler nods. Tries to shift his own gears from fight and run to driving.

“Yeah, okay. What do I do?”

His phone chirps one last time, and he fumbles it out of his pocket, passes it over to Eduardo.

“Read this for me.”

He hits the clutch when Dion says, and they back up a few inches before something catches. 

“Clutch,” Dion says, and they go forward a foot. “Cut it left.” 

Inch by inch they rock the truck out of it’s bind. Finally get it on the sidewalk and out of the building. Dion puts it in first and it rumbles forward. 

A man runs towards them from one of the cross-streets, shouldering past the dead without taking time to put them down. Tyler angles the truck alongside him, slows down and lets him jump in the back.

“It’s Jamie,” Eduardo says. “He says the team is leaving?”

Tyler nods. He knows what that means. 

“They gotta be at Love by eight.”

“Tell him we’re coming,” Tyler says, waits while Eduardo types. He hits a few of the dead on his way past, knocking them down. Maybe not smashing their brains, but they might be easier kills for the next people who come by. A woman waves her hand at them and they slow again; the guy in the back grabs her up into the truck. 

Pearl street is shut down, cars locked together, bumpers caught, packed in so close Tyler doesn’t know how the people got out. He turns southwest again, when he needs to be going north. 

Tyler clenches his jaw. They’re heading for Jamie, but it won’t be in time. Not for Jamie to get to the airport if he doesn’t leave right now. 

“Shit. Tell him it won’t be in time. Tell him. Tell him to go now. Tell him to take Marshall.”

Eduardo doesn’t answer, and Tyler guesses he’s typing. 

He picks through the traffic, up onto the sidewalk and sometimes cutting through the little green lawns of Dallas’ mini-parks. They pick up a couple more people, a guy in a dress shirt, another in a camo jacket, a woman in workout clothes.

A cluster of the dead come up from the passenger side, following a man limping, weighed down. Shit, Tyler can see he won’t make it. He angles the truck close though, just in case, and the man opens his arms and it’s a little kid he’s carrying. Tyler catches a glimpse of long dark hair, wide eyes and the man throws her to the people in the back of the truck. 

The pack drags him down screaming, and there’s nothing they can do, no way they can help. Tyler turns the wheel, grinds some of the dead between the side and the next car over. 

They finally have a break, a stretch of road and nothing moving. 

Tyler stops the truck, tries to get his bearings. Always-north has gotten them pretty far. Maybe two miles out from Jamie’s. The clock on the dash reads 8:19. The sun is up. 

The first guy they picked up taps on the driver’s side window, and Tyler looks out at him, half-numb with exhaustion.

“Hey,” the guy says. His eyes are very blue, his haircut very square. “I’m Brad. I’ve driven combat before. You want me to take the wheel?” 

Tyler nods, shaky, and Dion gets it into neutral. Tyler pops the lock and then slides back into the back seat, taking the phone from Eduardo.

_cant bring marsh out in this_  
too loud  
not safe  
tyler 

Jamie tell him to be safe. How to be safe. Tyler’s nose prickles and he can’t cry now. Won’t cry. He wanted Jamie gone, Jamie safe. But fuck he didn’t want to be alone in this shit. 

“Take. Take this turn up here,” Tyler tells their driver. Brad puts it in gear, a lot smoother than Tyler and Dion were managing together. He glances into the rear view mirror and meets Tyler’s eyes. 

Brad is a much better driver than Tyler, some trick he has going over the curbs that makes the jolt less violent. If it’s easier on those in the cab, it has to be a lot better for the people in the back. The tool box across the back would make a fine seat, but they’re hunkered down in the bed, and Tyler wonders if he threw anybody out, if anybody got grabbed because of his crappy driving.

“Shit!” Brad curses and cuts the wheel sharp left. “Too many to drive through. We can’t afford to cut that much speed.” He weaves between some cars, pushes one and drives half on the sidewalk for a block. There are more Deads there, and he puts it in reverse, tries to get into a parking lot’s entrance. 

The engine sputters and stalls. The dead are coming. Brad struggles with the key, messes with the stick-shift, swears some more.

“Shit!” Brad says, “I have to check the engine. Something must have got knocked loose. Gimme the gun!”

Eduardo passes it over and Brad checks the clip, holding the weapon like it’s a thing he’s intimately familiar with. 

He takes a slow breath. Doesn’t open the truck door. He turns the key, and the engine starts, smooth as anything. They are so fucking close to Jamie’s now. Brad drives, ignores Tyler’s directions. He finally gets to another little dead-free patch, between the Katy Trail greenbelt and a line of office buildings. 

“Look,” Brad says, regretful but determined. “I don’t want to hurt anybody, but my wife’s family has property outside of Waco. That’s where she’d go. I have to get to her. I can’t keep heading north.”

“We are like half a mile away,” Tyler says. “Look. You can have the truck. Just get us to the apartment.”

“I’m not going to risk it,” Brad says. Watches Tyler in the mirror. “We could get stuck. We could get mobbed. I could never get to her. You don’t have to get out. Nobody has to get out, but I’m not going north. This truck is not going north.” 

“You fucking asshole!” Darius says in his little-kid voice, but even nine years old he’s smart enough not to go after a guy with a gun. 

“Look,” Tyler begs. “Look. What about the people in the back?”

“Their choice,” Brad says, like he’s not fucking them over, too.

“Are you fucking kidding?” Tyler wants to grab him. Wants to take the bullet and get the gun and hope to hell one of the people in the back can drive this thing. Jamie is gone. Jamie is gone and he has to help his friends.

It won’t work. He can see it won’t work. He’ll die for nothing, and then they’ll be fucked twice as hard. Maybe someone else will get shot.

“Give us the keys,” Tyler says, trying to make his voice calm, firm. “The keys to the tool box. We’ve got one weapon among us. Don’t do that to us. Don’t you fucking pretend that wouldn’t kill us!”

Brad narrows his eyes, but he reaches down to feel on the keychain. Unsnaps a separate ring. There are keys, probably to the tailgate and the box. 

“You tell them back there. Whoever wants to go with you can. Whoever wants to go to Waco should stay in the truck.”

“Yeah,” Tyler says. He waves Darius and Eduardo out behind him. Eduardo opens Dion’s door, helps him to the ground. Tyler slips out and climbs straight into the back without touching foot to ground, not giving Brad time to leave without giving them the chance to get a weapon. 

“What’s going on?” the woman in the workout clothes asks. “Why did we stop?”

“He’s taking the truck,” Tyler says between his teeth, slotting the key and popping the lock. It’s full, and he starts dumping stuff into the floor of the truck bed. “If you want, you can go with him to Waco. My friends and I are heading north. We’re so fucking close to a place that should be good. It’s an apartment. Gated parking, gates on the ground floor entrances. I stocked it with food yesterday.” 

He gets tangled up in a jumper cable, but finds an ax, some kind of chrome-finished bar with a bendy do-hickey on the end and a pair of long-handled bolt-cutters, a mag-light and a buck knife. Behind him, someone is handing the cart down to Eduardo.

Brad revs the engine, warning that his patience is just about up. The kid, the little girl, is in the arms of a middle-age Latina. Eduardo is talking to her, and Tyler catches just a few words. They don’t sound very complimentary towards Brad. 

Most of the people are getting out. The woman hands the child down to Eduardo, and he puts her in the cart on Dion’s lap. Tyler passes the weapons back, grabs a roll of duct tape and a batch of zip-ties and gets out before Brad can take off. 

His phone chirps. Not Jamie this time. Jamie is on a plane. 

The battery is almost dead.

He can send one more text, if he sends it now.

The closer they get to home, the harder the rest of the trip feels, looming ahead of them. If…just…he doesn’t want Jamie to wonder. To think he did the wrong thing leaving. 

It’s not really a lie if he sends the message before something that is going to happen happens. 

_madeit home_  
mars is fine  


The little group is arranging itself, Ofelia, Darius and Eduardo managing the cart, the black guy in the camo jacket (Alfonse) and the dude in the dress shirt (Gary) to the sides, a spot for Tyler to trail the reverse-triangle. 

“Where we heading, kid?” Alfonse asks, voice gruff and low. Tyler isn’t sure if the jacket is a legit sign that the man served in the military, or window-dressing for his pan-handling spiel.

Tyler bites his lip. The battery icon on the phone blinks red. 

“Hang on a sec,” he says, and types:

_love you_  
fuck  
jamie  
i love you 

The screen goes black.

He’s not sure if it went through or not.

He stuffs the phone into his pocket and hefts the bat. It feels heavier every time he picks it up. 

“Okay. Let’s go.”


	7. Chapter 7

Jamie leads the women around the ramp to the parking-garage stairs and up. The bar in his hands is bent, the end-piece on one end broken clean off, leaving a hollow edge of metal. He’s not sure how much longer it’ll last, but he doesn’t have anything better to use. 

The apartment still smells like shit, even with the balcony door open. “Sorry,” he apologizes, reflexively. “I haven’t had time. I…”

Nikki looks at him like he’s lost his mind. 

He takes a breath, gets a hold of himself. They’re here; they’re safe. He doesn’t have to be the perfect host. 

“I have to go back down,” he says. “My boyfriend. He’s coming. I need to be there. To help him get through the gate. 

Kara nods. “Yeah. Yeah, you go. We’re fine here.”

He nods, shaky, starting to feel how hard his body’s been working, like a nightmare playoff-game that keeps going into overtime. Mo told them about ‘99, the bags of IV fluids waiting for the team in the dressing room between periods, bodies pushed beyond the breaking point. Being so tired he couldn’t think anymore, just play.

Jamie cracks open a Gatorade, drinks it down. Head to the bathroom off of his bedroom to take a piss and splash water on his face, double-checks the keys in his pocket and then he shoulders the rod, heads back for the stairs. 

His phone chirps as it receives a message when he’s halfway down. 

_u stil at ur plac?_

Tom Wandell. 

_yeah_ , Jamie sends back. Keeps heading down.

_coming your way_  
got stuck  
missed plane  
with loui and mik 

Jamie tries to figure out how the hell the team left without the fucking captain.

 _shes not move fast_ , Tom sends.  
_too much pregnant  
got caught out_

Jamie winces. Not Mike. Mikaela. Loui’s wife. Shit. He hadn’t thought of her, of what it must be like to be pregnant in this.

 _com here_ he texts back.  
_have food and wtr and gates_

Tom just replies with the letter K and Jamie hits the ground floor sidewalk, goes back to the side-gate. The bodies are still piled high, but the street is clear for the moment. He pulls the gate open, catches the corpses as they tumble in and shoves them back out. He steps on and over them and closes the gate behind himself. 

Bodies are heavy, most of them between one and two hundred pounds. Slippery with blood and gore. 

He has to stop once, and barf into the gutter, the sports drink burning his nose as it comes back up. Twice, he jumps back behind the safety of the gate and dispatches a few more wanderers. He takes a break, checks messages again. 

_still safe here_ he adds to the player’s group text.  
_if ur near and need shelter_

He hears footsteps on the stairs, two people coming down fast. He turns, the rod not really held up as a weapon, but there, ready, if it needs to be.

It’s the health-nut couple from down the hall. Her hair is in a pony-tail, with a sweatband around her forehead. They’re wearing hiking-clothes, sturdy boots, gloves. They’ve got matched walking sticks in hand, heavy shafts of solid wood, knobbed heads. 

“There are two girls going door-to-door upstairs, saying there’s _one guy_ keeping those things out of our building,” the woman says. 

“Thought you could use a hand,” the man adds.

Jamie nods. “My boyfriend. Tyler. He’s coming, he said. I have to make sure he can get in, that he doesn’t get followed through.”

“You’re _opening the gates?_ ” a new voice asks. Jamie turns, his eyes narrow.

It’s the asshole who’d been harassing Tyler. 

“Yeah,” Jamie says, lets it be a challenge. “Anybody that’s not like _them_ , I’m opening the gate and getting them inside.”

Asshole shakes his head. “You can’t do that. The news said to avoid crowds. If we let crowds in, we’re all screwed.”

Jamie sets his jaw, stubborn. “If we don’t open the gates, we’re killing people. I’m not gonna watch people die when I could let them in.”

“Hey, I’m sorry about your boyfriend,” Asshole says, “But you can’t risk us all over that.”

Jamie feels the haze of a fighting fury rising up in his chest. 

“So you’ll try to weasel your way into his pants, but he doesn’t deserve to live?”

The guy backs up a step. 

“Fuck you,” Jamie says, “Go back to your apartment. Be safe. If you don’t want to help, don’t you come to us when it’s you who needs to be on the inside. You hear me?”

He dares to glance at the couple, so afraid that they’ll agree with the jerk. They both look ready to work, like they’re waiting on Jamie’s cue. 

Asshole sighs out a “God damn it all,” and stalks off.

“So!” says the woman, forcedly bright. “I’m Kate, this is Chet. Nice to finally meet our neighbor, shitty conditions, etcetera etcetera.”

Jamie snorts. “Hi. Jamie.”

“Yours is the cutie with the pink hair?”

He swallows hard. “Yeah. That’s tyler. He’s on his way, and I’ve got teammates who got caught out, they’re heading here too.”

“You got a plan?” Chet asks. 

“Keep the gates clear. Kill as many as we can from inside before they start to clog up the place, and then you guys watch my back while I drag them out of the way. Try not to open the garage gates, but if we have to, we don’t stand and fight, we draw them back up the ramp, take them down one at a time. Try to keep the man-advantage. They’re dumb as shit, and it’s us they want. We just can’t let them surround us.”

“Sounds solid,” Kate says, and they start work. Jamie shows them how to get the dead people to stay dead, and they draw in waves of them by banging the fence, dispatch them and then wait for a lull to drag the bodies a few feet away, piling them up against the wall. 

“You weren’t kidding with the dumb,” Kate says, as one of them trips over a not-moving one’s leg and goes down. Its face smashes straight into the sidewalk with no attempt to slow itself down. It doesn’t move. 

They work. A few other people come down out of the apartments, and Jamie sets up another team of three on the stairs gate at the other end of the building. It doesn’t seem a good idea to draw the dead up to the garage gate, since it’ll be so hard to clean up without letting more inside.

Three times, they see someone alive, and get a gate open in time. Once, they’re not fast enough.

He drifts between the two gates, helping where they need it, going out to guard the cleanup pairs just for the chance to look down the road, see if he can see Tyler coming in.

Nikki comes down with a tray of sandwiches and a bag full of Gatorade bottles. She gets everybody fed and turns to head up. Jamie touches her elbow before she can go. 

“Thanks,” he says. “For getting me the help.”

She snorts. “Don’t be a hero, dumbass.”

Jamie starts to say something, but there’s an urgent whispering at the gate. “He doesn’t _look_ dead.”

Jamie joins the small group there, looking out. There’s a guy moving on the sidewalk on the other side of the road. _Not-Tyler_ is Jamie’s first assessment. Dark short hair. Glancing furtively around. Cradling his left arm in his right. 

James fucking Neal. Of all the Stars who could possibly show up on his doorstep, Jamie is least-happy to have it be this one. 

Still. Team is team.

There are no dead between James and the gate.

“I’ll go bring him in,” Jamie says, and Kate and Chet hold the gate open while Jamie grabs his weapon and crosses the street.

Nealer looks wrecked, like he’s left something of himself on his journey here. His eyes are wide and his face pale except for where long scratches mark his cheek. Jamie refuses to think about whatever happened to James happening to Tyler. He won’t. Can’t. 

“Benn? Holy shit are you really still okay? Did anybody else make it?”

Jamie grabs his arm and keeps him moving towards the gate. A few of the dead are following, but he puts some hustle on it and they can’t keep up. 

Neal stumbles through, and the gate clangs shut behind them. The man is shaking, and Jamie keeps him moving. He thinks if he lets him stop, Neal will collapse and have to be dragged or carried, and Jamie frankly doesn’t have the goodwill towards this guy to go to that much trouble. 

“Come on, slackass. One foot in front of the other.”

He drives Neal in front of him up the stairs, but leads the way once they get to the fourth floor. There are bags of garbage leaning against the wall in the hallway by his apartment. The door is locked, and it confuses him for a second, because he left it open. But then he can’t blame anybody doing whatever makes them feel safe in this shit. He knocks, calls “Kara, it’s me, Jamie,” and then gets out his keys to let himself in.

The place is a hell of a lot neater than the last time he saw it. The newspapers are cleaned up and besides the faint smell of death wafting in the open French doors, it doesn’t reek anymore. 

Marshall’s cage is closer to the front entrance than Tyler usually keeps it, and Jamie bends to check that she’s still okay as Nealer stumbles in behind him. 

Marshall comes to Jamie, nuzzles his fingers through the bars, the entire back-half of her body wriggling in happiness.

And then James steps into her line of sight and she yelps in fear, cowers back into the corner, yowling in terror. 

“The fuck is wrong with your dog?” Neal asks, and Jamie stands up, turns to face him.

“You’re wrong,” Jamie says, eyes narrowing. She didn’t freak out at him coming back up with dead-people-spatter all over him. Didn’t react to the women. But Neal is freaking her out.

“Why are you wrong?” Jamie asks. Behind him, Kara fumbles an empty plastic bottle. He hears it bounce over the counter and down onto the floor.

“Nothing’s wrong!” Neal protests. He’s still cradling his arm though. His face looks waxy and sallow, peppered with beads of sweat. 

Jamie reaches out and grabs the bad arm at the wrist, pushes his sleeve up with the other hand. Quick, before Neal can react. 

The double-crescent of a human bite mark mars the meat of Neal’s forearm, broken skin swollen and crusted with dried blood. Jamie jerks back in revulsion, in fear of contagion. 

“You’re sick,” Jamie breathes. His head spins. “You’re sick. Like them.”

“No!” Neal shoves him back, pulls his sleeve back down. “No, I’m fine! Swear to god, I’m fucking fine!”

Jamie shakes his head. Neal isn’t okay. He’s really isn’t. And Jamie needs to do something about that. Needs to take charge and keep everybody inside safe. He said it was okay to let them in, the people who weren’t dead. He can’t be the reason people who trusted him die. 

He just doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know if James can possibly survive this. 

“Okay,” Jamie says, trying to sound reasonable. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do; you’re going to go sit in the bathroom until you feel better, and we’ll keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t hurt anybody. I’ll bring you some water and food…”

The punch to the face is more startling than painful. He stumbles back against Marshall’s cage, the wires screeching as they bend. He’s shocked, that James would fucking _dare_ and then it takes him point-six seconds to go from trying to be reasonable to really fucking pissed off. 

He shoves Neal back into the door, pounds him twice with his right hand, his knuckles still taped from his meager precautions earlier. Neal manages to get him once in the ribs, but Jamie is bigger, stronger, and as fuck-tired as he is, he’s still fresher than whatever Neal’s been through in the past twelve hours. 

He hits Neal’s head back into the door, and wrestles him face-down on the foyer tile before he can recover his wits. Sits on his back and drags both of Neal’s arms behind him. 

He hadn’t really thought through what he was going to do, but the roll of sports tape is still on the island, and that’ll do. 

“Kara,” he calls, “Pass me that tape. Pass me the tape and I can tie him up.”

Kara is on the other side of the island, her hands pressed against her mouth, eyes wide and frozen, just frozen in place. Shit. 

“Hey,” Jamie makes his voice softer. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s over. I need your help, okay?” 

She nods, hesitant. He wonders if this is how she reacted the first time a dead approached her. Freezing. Going invisible to their fucked up senses. 

“Do you see that roll of tape?” 

She nods again. 

“I need you to bring that to me. Can you do that?”

Neal wriggles under him, cursing and spitting and Jamie wrenches up on his arm to keep him still. 

“This is the best I can do for you, James,” Jamie tells him. “You’re either dead or you’ll be okay, and if you’re dead, I can’t let you take anybody with you. You could have just fucking gone in the bathroom like I said, but no, you had to be a pain in my fucking ass.”

Kara finally gets unstuck and brings the roll of tape over. It’s good stuff, white and strong. Jamie wraps it three times around James’ good wrist, pulls them together and loops the entire rest of the roll around both wrists. 

He wants to kick James when he’s done, when he stands up with fresh aches and new bruises. He checks his fist, but he didn’t manage to split himself open on James’ teeth. 

“Come on, asshole,” Jamie says, and half-carries, half-drags him into the guest bathroom. 

“No!” James argues. “No, fuck you, you fat-ass faggot! Don’t you fucking dare! Don’t you do this!”

Jamie lowers him down onto his side on the floor, snatches his hand back when Neal tries to bite him. He’s not sure if it’s the sickness making James do that, or if he’s just that desperate. James kicks him and Jamie kicks back. He pulls down the curtain rod, steps back and slams the door on James’ continued protests.

There’s no way to lock it from the outside, but he takes the curtain rod, gets a wire hanger from a dry-cleaning bag in his own closet. He bends the wire around the doorknob, lays the rod horizontally in front of it, and wraps the wire securely around that to hold it up. He goes back in his room and finds another roll of tape, tapes the rod to the wall on both ends so it won’t fall even if the wire gets a little slack in it. If James gets his arms loose, he’ll have to struggle with that. It won’t hold him, but it’ll give them time to react.

“Don’t go in there, for any reason,” Jamie tells Kara. “Don’t open that door for any reason. If he starts trying to get through the door, you run, okay? You come downstairs. I’ll send Nikki back up to help you, she should be up in a sec.” 

She nods, but he’s not sure that’s a promise she can keep, if that’s the way she’s wired. 

It’s the best he can do. He adds dogs to their list of resources, their list of things worth finding, worth keeping. He picks up his weapon again and heads back for the fucking stairs. He needs to tell the others. Needs everybody to have every tool at their disposal. 

He’s telling Chet and Kate, asking if they know if any of their neighbors have dogs, when his phone chirps. 

He’d been trying to ignore it. Trying not to text Tyler every ten minutes. Chet gives him a knowing look and turns to give him privacy to check his messages.

He steps back from the gate, pulls out his phone. 

_madeit home_  
mars is fine  
  
Jamie stares at the words, trying to make sense of them. Tyler has not come through. He’d know. There would have been a commotion at the gate. Kate and Chet know him. Someone would have told Jamie. Tyler isn’t fucking here, but Jamie heads back for the stairs anyway. Has to get home, to be sure Tyler didn’t find some other way inside, has to see with his own eyes.

_love you_  
fuck  
jamie  
i love you 

Jamie stumbles on the second-floor landing, feeling like he got punched in the chest. That’s. No. That’s fucking _goodbye_ and Jamie can’t take that. Doesn’t need to hear that. Needs Tyler to be fucking home, right the fuck now. 

_no_ he types back, fast as his fingers can hit send.

_no fuck_  
tyler where are you  
I’ll come to you  
What the hell  
Please  
Where are you 

He stares down at his phone. Trying to force Tyler to answer by sheer will. 

Fuck.

He finishes going upstairs, still clinging to the shadow of hope.

Kara looks up when Jamie comes in. The sounds of Neal kicking the door echo through the room. He doesn’t have time for this shit.

“Take Marshall and go down. I’ll send someone up to take care of him,” he says, and then he turns around, heads down again. Tyler is not there. Tyler said goodbye. Tyler fucking _lied_ to him and is out there somewhere still and Jamie is in here. Keeping the way clear is useless if Tyler isn’t coming, if Tyler is _saying goodbye_.

“The guy I took up is sick,” Jamie says as he gets to the gate. “He’s tied up in the bathroom but somebody needs to go make sure he doesn’t get out. I was going to, but I gotta go.”

“What?” one of the men Jamie barely knows asks. “Wait, where are you…”

Jamie grabs the handle and opens the gate. Steps over the dead and out into the morning light.

He shatters the skull of the first dead-guy to come up to him, and then he has a decision to make. North or south? Oak Lawn or Deep Ellum. Trying to remember every place Tyler has mentioned. If he’s with Dion and Eduardo, they were probably in the Gayborhood. He turns north. 

“Jamie, wait!” Chet calls from behind him, but Jamie can’t stop. Can’t lose this momentum. They’ll be fine without him. He’s not turning around until he has Tyler.

“Shit, what are you…” There’s a scuffle and the clang of the gate closing. 

Jamie picks his way through the streets, using cars and trucks as obstacles, ways to keep the dead from seeing him, from coming up at him more than one or two at a time. He hits a side-street that runs due north that is completely empty of the dead and makes some good time. 

He knows, that this is stupid, that there’s no chance. In all of Dallas, he’s not going to find one boy with pink hair. He knows, even before he sees the people, trapped on a decorative wall where they must have climbed for temporary shelter and gotten surrounded, that he needs to turn around. Needs to be in a fixed place if he wants to ever see Tyler again. 

The dead are so focused on the trio, two men, one woman, that they barely turn as Jamie starts bashing their heads in. It’s more work than fight, methodical butchery. 

It isn’t until there are no more to kill that he looks up, that his exhausted brain can put faces to memories. He knows these guys.

“Jamie?” Tom asks. 

“Yeah.” His voice doesn’t sound like his own. Tom helps Mikaela to stand, and Loui lifts her from behind. She is seriously pregnant. Together, they walk her across the broad top of the wall to where it curves and slopes down to the flower beds. Jamie wants to offer her a hand, but both of hers are full, so he turns to guard them instead. 

Love Field is north of his apartment too.

“Hey. Did you happen to see a kid with a pink mohawk? About six feet tall?”

Tom winces, shakes his head. “Your Tyler?”

Jamie nods. “He went out. Before I got home yesterday. He’s…not back yet.”

Mikaela closes her eyes and leans on Loui’s shoulder. 

“Come on,” Jamie says, “The apartment isn’t far. Let’s get you inside.”


	8. Chapter 8

Gary steps between a cluster of the dead and the cart. Too many for him to take, too many for all of them to take. Tyler wants to help him, but there’s no way to get to him in time, nothing that Tyler can do that would change things. Gary goes downs screaming, swinging the mag-light. One of the dead things falls, but the rest of the crowd descends onto him, grabbing his flailing limbs, biting, chewing, _eating_ him. 

Tyler feels like he’s losing. Like this is Davey, Cameron, Casey, all over again. All the people he’s lost and he still can’t figure out how to keep them safe, keep them alive. His legs burn. His palms ache, bruised from hitting heads with the bat.

“Move, move, move,” he says, grabbing the front of the cart, helping Eduardo lift the front wheels over the next curb. 

One of the dead raises his head from feeding on Gary, mouth bloody from ear to ear, turns its head in their direction like it’s trying to figure out if it wants to leave the food it has for the prospect of more. It turns back to the feast at hand, and Tyler lets out the breath he’d been holding.

They’re a block away now. One block from Jamie’s apartment, from water and food and precious precious gates.

Alfonse moves in to cover their back. He’s got a rough, unmissable limp, but he hasn’t slowed them down. Ofelia looks tired, her steps dragging like she doesn’t have much left, but she hasn’t stopped. Tyler thinks she’ll go until her heart gives out. Thinks she’ll keep pushing that cart until she can’t anymore. That she won’t leave them, even if she might move faster on her own. Darius is more hanging off of the cart than pushing it now, his eyes glazed with exhaustion. Dion’s eyes are pinched closed, but he keeps hold of the little girl in his lap, doesn’t make a word of complaint. Eduardo pulls the cart from the front, keeping the wheels clear, keeping it on track.

Alfonse ducks around one of the dead’s grasping fingers, takes it down with the bar he’s using as a weapon. Two more close in on his sides, and Tyler lets go of the cart and takes the few steps to his side, puts one of them down and Alfonse takes care of the last one.

And then there’s sudden breathing room. Some dead back the way they came, moving slow, but nothing ahead of them. They hustle down the last block, dodging around parked cars. 

“Almost there,” Tyler promises. “So close. We’re so close.”

The dead are piled up against the building Jamie lived in, bodies dumped like bags of trash, arms and legs sticking up, skulls broken open, eyes poked out, heads and faces ruined. The blood trickles along the cracks in the sidewalk, drips into the gutters. They look. Just like people. Like people that got killed. At the gate, half a dozen that are on their feet, rattling the bars, moaning hungrily. 

Tyler nearly goes to his knees, nearly gives up. No, no, please, there’s too many. Him and Alfonse and Eduardo can’t possibly make it through that, can’t possibly get everybody safely in.

But then the dead fall back from the gate, literally crumple lifeless and are pushed onto their backs as they fall, one by one. The gate swings in with a clank, and there are people behind it, living people, stepping out onto the sidewalk, waving them inside. 

“Get Dion in!” Tyler gasps, pushes the cart into the hands of one of Jamie’s neighbors. There are corpses in the way, and the cart can’t get any closer. People are slipping and struggling as they step on the bodies, as they try to find a place to put their feet on solid ground. A man and a woman, the athletic couple from down the hall, come and take Dion out of the cart. Ofelia has the little girl. 

Tyler glances over his shoulder, checking to see how close the dead are, if they’ve caught up yet.

Another group of living people is coming from the north, two men half-carrying a woman between them. She’s not moving right, struggling to keep her feet under her, one arm cupped around her very large belly. Fighting like she’s trying to stand upright with a body that wants to curl in on itself.

They’re slow, too slow to keep ahead of the dead. Another guy follows behind them, buying them time, swinging a short pole at whichever dead gets closest to them. 

There are a lot of dead behind them.

“Help us!” the man on the left says, and Tyler knows that guy. Shit. That’s Jamie’s friend Tom.

“Get them in,” he begs the people at the gate, and then he’s moving. Against his better judgment, against any kind of good sense, he’s moving, as fast as he can run, passing Tom and the guy with the cheekbones and the woman who is so incredibly pregnant. He’s lost too many, seen too many people die in the past day to turn his back on them. 

One of the dead is almost on the third guy, and Tyler steps in, swings and breaks both its arms before it can grab him and pull him down. They fight, trying not to stop and let themselves be overrun, but still keep the dead off of the three people they’re guarding. Tyler and the guy at his shoulder falling back step by step, just ahead of the overwhelming wave that is coming for them. 

Jamie. The guy is Jamie. Jamie grabbing his shoulder, pulling him back. Tyler is almost too tired to process it. “They’re in! They’re in! Get inside the gate!” 

Jamie, trailing behind him, keeping him safe, herding him forward to the now-crowded area where the stairs and the corridor to the first-floor apartments meet. Tyler trips in the slippery pile of dead, goes down on his knees, hands sticky with gore. Jamie grabs his arm, lifts him up as the dead who walk close in. Lifts him up and pushes him forward over the threshold. People catch him, bring him in. Bring Jamie in.

The gate clangs shut behind them. Safe. They’re finally safe.

=============

Jamie trails behind the Swedes, batting down the dead when they get too close, when Mikaela can’t lift her feet and the men have to carry her. They aren’t moving fast enough. Can’t move fast enough. They aren’t making much noise, but dead guys are stumbling out of the park, out of alley-ways, from between cars. More and more of them, a living wall closing in behind the group. 

He’s pretty sure he’s going to die. It’s just a matter of giving the others the best chance he can.

Tom and Loui turn the last corner and Jamie comes behind them, zig-zagging and slowing the dead. He turns, sees hands reaching for him. One has missing fingers, skin torn and hanging ragged from the bones. 

An aluminum bat crashes down on the dead woman’s arms with a distinctive metallic thunk, breaks them between wrist and elbow. She stumbles forward, and the bat swings again and Jamie glances over, sees his rescuer--pink hair, wide eyes, dirty face. _Tyler. Fucking Tyler._

He can’t breathe, but he fights anyway. Swings with strength he thought was already spent. Hustles Tyler behind him, towards the gate, so fucking close to the gate. The Swedes get through. Tyler falls and Jamie catches him, drags him up. Hands reach to take them, living ahead of them, dead behind. Jamie pushes through with the last of his strength, lets them pull him those last few steps. Kate slams the gate as soon as he’s through. 

The dead keep coming forward, and a man moves up to the bars. The guy who had harassed Tyler. He must have decided he wanted to be part of the group after all. He’s carrying one of the pool cues from the communal game-room, the tip cut off at an angle, and it makes a good spear. He puts it through a dead boy’s eye. Chet pushes the body with his walking stick when it goes slack, back from the gate. 

They’ve got this, and Jamie can turn, can wrap Tyler in his arms, press their foreheads together.

“You asshole,” Jamie says, his voice cracking, broken. His throat is tight. His nose prickles. “You fucking lying asshole, you told me goodbye. You told me goodbye when you could have said where you fucking were!”

He clings, desperate. Almost too close to see Tyler’s face, to watch the dance of joy and sharp bitter sorrow that keeps flashing over his features.

“You were supposed to be gone!” Tyler says, like he wishes Jamie had been. “You were supposed to be _safe._ ”

He’s shaking, clinging, and Jamie holds him. Presses his face to Tyler’s temple and tries to find his scent in the midst of blood and death. 

“Come on,” Jamie says. “Lets go upstairs.”

There’s some fumbling attempt at order. Jamie ends up holding Dion up on one side while Eduardo takes the other. There’s a little kid, maybe three years old, and she ends up being carried by Tyler somehow, legs wrapped tight around his waist and arms around his neck. Tom and Loui carry Mikaela between them. She makes a sound from between her teeth, a scream held back, and Jamie doesn’t know what to do about that, doesn’t even know what can be done. 

There’s a blood-trail coming out of Jamie’s door when they get up to the third floor. Nikki shakes her head when he shoots her a questioning glance. He feels guilty, even though it’s not his fault Neal got bit, that he was dangerous, that Jamie couldn’t fix it. He hopes Neal didn’t hurt anybody; it’ll be on Jamie if he did. A mistake he can’t take back.

They bumble into Jamie’s apartment, so weak and tired that walking is not a sure thing. “Bedroom is that way,” he says to Loui, hopes nobody else has been sheltered in there while he was gone. He watches Marshall, as Tyler and his group file in, Dion and Eduardo and a younger black kid, a middle-age Hispanic woman, an older black guy in camo. The dog paces her cage, whines until Tyler pokes his fingers through, but doesn’t freak out.

They put Dion on the couch, and the old guy sits on the edge, pulls a knife and slits the leg of his jeans from ankle to hip. Dion makes a pained sound and Eduardo holds onto his hand. 

The woman goes with the Swedes into the master bedroom, bossing the men around in Spanish that neither of them understands. They seem grateful enough that someone is willing to take charge of helping Mikaela that they aren’t protesting.

Tyler snags his backpack off of the island and looks around in a daze, like he can’t believe where he is. He finally picks a spot on the floor by the wall. Leans against the wall and slides down to the carpet. The little kid clings to him, and he looks like he’s about done. 

“Here,” Kara says, and passes Jamie a drink and a bowl of canned soup. He brings it to Tyler, and Tyler leans back against the wall, tries to get the kid to eat a little but she seems more tired than hungry. Jamie isn’t sure what language she’s speaking, but it isn’t English or Spanish. 

“Hey,” Nikki says, and he looks over at her. Everything seems to be moving slow. “I’ll go take a shift at the gates. You rest a bit. You’ve done enough.”

Jamie feels like he should go back down. Like he should do something, but he can’t find the energy. 

“Yeah,” he says. Slowly folds to the ground beside Tyler. Shoulders touching. Tyler. Alive. Tyler safe. He can’t think of a time when he was happier to sit down. 

The child closes her eyes, clinging to Tyler’s t-shirt despite the spatters of blood and gore on it. 

The late-morning sun shines November-crisp through the blinds, ridiculing their exhaustion. Jamie tries not to look at the trail of red leading from the spare bathroom to the front door.

Mikaela lets out a strangled scream in the other room, and Jamie tries not to listen, feels like an intruder, like he’s hearing something she wouldn’t want him to.

Tyler leans against him, heavier.

“We made it,” Tyler whispers. 

Jamie leans in and presses his lips against Tyler’s hair. 

“You did good,” Jamie says, in case Tyler doesn’t know that. He got seven people to safety, including himself. That’s damn good.

“You too,” Tyler says, and Jamie doesn’t know how much credit he can take. The others all worked too, even the jerk from down the hall. 

He looks down and Tyler’s eyes are closed, his lips parted, his face lax with sleep. 

Jamie scoops the backpack to the side and gently lowers Tyler down. Wishes there was somewhere better than the fucking floor for him to sleep. 

Tyler startles awake before he’s even halfway down, eyes wide and hand reaching for the bat, fingers closing around it.

Jamie isn’t dumb enough to try to grab onto him, but he can’t let Tyler swing either. He puts a hand on the bat instead, pins it to the floor.

“You’re okay. Tyler, it’s me. You’re okay.”

Tyler draws in a breath, blinks and orients himself. “Jamie,” he whispers like he’s not sure, like he can barely believe.

“Yeah,” Jamie assures him. “Come on, lay down. I’m not going anywhere.”

Tyler finishes the slow lean to lay on his side, his head pillowed on his backpack. He jerks his head up again as soon as he’s down though.

“Phone. Gotta charge it. Gotta call…”

Jamie isn’t sure who Tyler would need to call that’s not here, but he holds out his hand, and Tyler digs the phone out of his jeans pocket, the charger out of his backpack and passes them both over. 

Jamie plugs it in, too tired to interact with the other people in the room, their pain, their utter exhaustion. One task at a time, he gets the phone plugged in and goes back. Tyler is out cold when he gets there, and Jamie curls up on the floor beside him, his body between Tyler and the room, the little girl between them. 

He’s got Tyler back. Now all he has to do is keep him safe.


	9. Chapter 9

Jamie isn’t sure how he falls asleep, through Mikaela’s muffled screams, Dion’s pained murmurs, Kara banging around in his kitchen. He does though. Wakes up to the tremulous new-baby cry coming from his bedroom. Marshall whines, not desperate, just pointing out that maybe nobody has fed her, or taken her out of her cage in a bit. 

He sits up, body aching. He can’t remember being this sore in his life, not the first game after a long summer, not training with the Stars. His hands are swollen against the white lines of the tape, and he picks at the end of the wrap, slowly peels it off. Flexes his knuckles.

He looks down at Tyler, sleeping peacefully, his long eyelashes laying soft against his blood-flecked cheeks, the dark haired child tucked under his chin. He wants to poke Tyler awake, wants to see him do more than breathe. Wants to check him over, touch every inch of skin, treat every scratch and bruise.

Tyler needs to sleep though, and Jamie levers himself to his feet, pulling up on the back of the chair. The black boy is curled up asleep in the chair. The sun is still out, but lower on the horizon. After noon, Jamie thinks, glances over at the clock on the stove and sees that it’s just after three. 

The apartment is too quiet to have this many people in it. Too still. It feels like he’s drifting, half-asleep, maybe half-dreaming. A low drone of noise filters through the still-open French doors, wind and the distant moan of the dead. 

He finds Marshall’s leash, looped over her cage. Her water bowl is upside down, empty. Jamie can’t remember ever seeing it like that. He lifts the latch and opens the cage door just far enough for her to wiggle out and into his arms. He snaps the leash on and picks her up. 

There is a moment of indecision when he opens the door and steps out into the hall. It’s not like he can actually take her _out_. He goes to the stairs and heads up, takes the walkway to the uncovered upper level of the parking garage. 

Marshall sniffs around, and Jamie stares out into the distance. Something is burning, to the east, but they are upwind and the smoke is going the other direction. No sirens. No firetrucks rushing to the scene.

He thinks he’ll put Marshall back in her crate and head down to see how everyone is doing when she’s done, but he opens the door to the apartment and Tyler is sitting up, looking tired and adorably confused. His hair is flopped over, a few strands still trying valiantly to stand up straight. 

“I think I got pissed on,” he whispers when Jamie raises his eyebrows at him. The little girl’s pants are wet, but she’s still asleep. 

“You need to clean up anyway,” Jamie says, knowing he’s not in any better condition. He puts Marshall away. Takes her dish and fills it up with water for her.

Tyler makes a hum of assent, tries and fails to push himself up off of the floor. Jamie offers him a hand and he makes it to his feet. 

“Fuuuck,” Tyler groans, quiet. 

Jamie follows the dark smear on the carpet, the last remnants of Neal, to the guest bath. There’s no curtain rod, and the curtain is still crumpled in the tub. He pulls it out and spreads it over the blood on the floor. He’s not sure he can deal with stepping in it, tracking it around.

Tyler turns on the shower and Jamie sneaks into the master bedroom to get them some clothes. Mikaela and Loui are in Jamie’s bed, the baby bundled up between them. They murmur softly to each other, a small closed world of three. Tom is sitting on the floor, his shoulder against the bed, the nightstand at his back. He blinks up at Jamie, gives a single nod and closes his eyes again. The older woman who had come in and taken care of the birth is curled up in the corner, Jamie’s bathrobe draped over her.

Jamie raids the closet and his dresser and heads back to the bathroom. He expects to find Tyler already wet, but he’s still dressed, staring at himself in the mirror, blinking slowly.

“Hey,” Jamie says, soft, moving behind Tyler’s shoulder, looking in the mirror with him. They look—different. Older. 

“Hey,” Tyler echoes. “The uh, power might not last long. There might not be many more hot showers. I thought maybe you’d want to share it with me?”

Jamie will never understand how Tyler can make something innocuous sound flirty and an invitation to shower together seem utterly casual. He meets Tyler’s eyes in the mirror, and yeah, he’d passed the last time Tyler made that offer. He could pass again. But. 

His worries about how he looks, how he’ll compare to Tyler’s lean strength, it doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore. The fucking world has gone to shit. And who knows, if he’ll get another chance.

“Yeah.” His voice is rough, and he ducks his head. 

Tyler reaches back and pulls his shirt off over his head. Jamie turns to the side, stripping off his pants first, then socks and underwear, and finally his own shirt, crackly with dried blood. He follows Tyler into the tub, the shower spray bouncing off of them and onto the plastic on the floor. Moves close, too close for Tyler to dwell over Jamie’s build, over his body. 

The dark flecks on Tyler’s arms and face turn pink and wind their way down his skin, tiny rivers of color where there should be none. Jamie reaches up, unsure if he’s allowed, if he’s doing the right thing. Wipes the lines off of Tyler’s cheek, rubs a stubborn dark spot until it melts away. Tyler turns his head, kisses Jamie’s palm. Breathes against his skin and Jamie doesn’t know how they got so lucky. Alive. Together. Alive alive alive.

Jamie leans in, forehead to forehead, his other hand at Tyler’s waist, fingers grasping tight. He feels Tyler’s ragged breath, hopes desperately that Tyler isn’t about to cry. 

Tyler turns, nudges his cheek against Jamie’s. Tips his head back and brushes their lips together. 

Jamie sighs out against Tyler’s mouth, falls into the slow ease of the kiss. Light and shallow, feeling each other breathe, feeling their hearts beat. He can’t tell if the moisture gathered on the tips of Tyler’s eyelashes is water or tears. He cups his hand behind Tyler’s head, the other against the small of his back, and Tyler leans in, slim and strong and slick from the shower. 

The kiss turns desperate between one breath and the next, Tyler pressing into him, trusting Jamie’s size, Jamie’s strength to hold them up. Jamie gets a cross-eyed glimpse of Tyler’s face, his brow furrowed in concentration, in something other than simple desire.

“I need…” Tyler gasps, and he’s hard against Jamie. 

“Yeah,” Jamie says, to whatever Tyler wants from him. “Yeah. Tell me…” 

Tyler nips under his jaw and Jamie groans at the pinch of his teeth, feels strong and wanted.

“Can I…” Tyler asks, and Jamie thinks. Maybe Tyler is asking for something specific here, something big. 

“Okay,” Jamie says again, to anything. Everything. Tyler pulls back, turns him around to face the tile. Better. That’s better. He thinks he looks hotter from the back, knows that hockey has shaped his ass and thighs nicely, that he doesn’t have bad shoulders. His heart pounds so loud in his head he can barely hear the shower. Can barely think over the rhythm of it as Tyler pets him and then steps away for a second. Oh shit. Okay. Shit.

Tyler’s hand slides between his legs, slick with something. Conditioner maybe. 

“Jamie,” he murmurs, choked and desperate. His warm arms go around Jamie’s chest, hold Jamie’s back against his chest. His dick slides in between the tops of Jamie’s thighs, the tip nudging his balls, shaft rubbing his perineum. 

Tyler reaches down, wraps Jamie’s dick in his cool slick hand. Squeezes tighter than Jamie would, but it’s slick enough that there’s no friction, only pressure and movement. Almost too much, too tight. Pulling forward until only the head is in Tyler’s tight grip. So intense it makes him jerk against it.

“Oh god,” Tyler pants. Jamie flexes his thighs, squeezes them as tightly together as he can. He wants. To make it good, to make it good enough that Tyler remembers the next time he’s risking his life for other people. Remembers he has something worth living for. 

Jamie shakes as he comes, thighs trembling, exhausted muscles unable to keep it up for long. Tyler pushes him up against the cool tile, reaches down and squeezes Jamie’s butt cheeks together, gives himself a tighter fit. He pumps three more times, and grinds his cheekbone into the back of Jamie’s shoulder as he spurts wet and hot behind Jamie’s balls. 

They lean against the tile for a while, Tyler’s breath ticklish against Jamie’s back. 

“Are you…was that okay?” Tyler asks, his voice small under the sound of falling water.

Jamie reaches back, pats Tyler’s ass awkwardly. Elbows weren’t made to bend that direction. 

“I’m good,” Jamie says, wants to say _Thank you,_ wants to say _Anything you need, I want to give you._

Tyler kisses his shoulder again, reverent. Sighs and pulls away. The water feels cooler than Tyler’s body against him had. Tyler reaches for the shampoo, lathers up his strip of hair and passes it over. They finish cleaning up quick. Step out of the shower into a puddle of pink water where the over-spray has re-wet the blood from their dirty clothes. Shit. It’s everywhere. Jamie’s stomach twists, but he steps over the mess to a clean corner and dries off there, facing the wall as he gets dressed again. 

“I’ve got. People I need to call,” Tyler says, from behind him, like he doesn’t expect Jamie to like it. “I need—I have to go get them, if they’re still okay.”

And no, Jamie doesn’t like it at all. 

“What? No, you just got here.” His jaw clenches. He pulls his shirt over his head, feels better when he’s more covered. He doesn’t want to fight. Doesn’t want to tell Tyler no, either. He feels like the relief of the shower is slipping from his fingers.

He turns around and Tyler’s dressed, his eyes down as he pushes the filthy clothes into the deepest puddle with his shoe, trying to sop some of it up.

“They can come here,” Jamie tries, trying to swallow the jealousy, that there’s someone else so important in Tyler’s life. “We’ll keep the way clear. Go out to meet them if we can. They’ll be okay.”

Tyler shakes his head. “They. They’re not young guys, Jamie. David can barely walk on a good day. Neither of them can run. They.” He looks up then, his whiskey-brown eyes begging Jamie to understand. 

“I have to do this,” Tyler pleads, like Jamie’s opinion matters, like Jamie could stop him if he really wanted to leave. “They. Helped me when I was fucked, when I was hungry or cold.” He frowns, like the words hurt. “They never made me feel like I owed them anything. They didn’t just make it easier to survive. They gave me hope that there was a reason to keep living. I can’t. Jamie, I can’t leave them out there. I can’t not-help them.” 

The idea of going out there is terrifying, but as bad as it is, the idea of Tyler out there alone is worse.

“How far?” Jamie asks.

“I don’t know yet,” Tyler admits. “I have to call. Make sure they’re home, find out where it is.”

Jamie sits down on the toilet lid, stuffs his feet into his boots, heedless of the pink tinge where his socks are damp. He wonders if it makes him a bad person that he can’t quite _want_ Tyler to get hold of them, that he hopes they got somewhere safe already without Tyler going out.

“If you’re going, I’ll go with you,” he says. Tyler opens his mouth, set to object, and Jamie shakes his head. “No. Seriously, no. I can’t.” His voice cracks. “I can’t take it if you go out there without me again. I can’t take it if you leave me.”

Tyler looks torn, and that’s not what Jamie wanted. Didn’t want to torture him with higher stakes, but Tyler going out alone is more than he can take. 

“Okay,” Tyler says, his voice gruff. “Yeah. Okay. I’ll call them. Okay? And then we’ll know. We’ll plan.”

Jamie nods, still not happy, but relieved to have a compromise he can live with. He wants to draw Tyler in, wants to hold him close, feel him breathe, just for a moment, but Tyler doesn’t look like he would welcome it at all. His body language is closed, his face set in grim lines. 

Tyler turns, struggles with the plastic on the floor before he can get the door open, and goes out to the living area, leaving Jamie damp and bruised and so fucking tired. 

He climbs to his feet on the strength of his will more than his legs and follows Tyler out, in case he can add anything to the conversation.


	10. Chapter 10

Tyler turns his back on Jamie and tries to open the bathroom door, but the plastic is bunched up and he has to pull it back, has to struggle with the red smeared mess of it to get out. He starts to panic, trapped in this wreck of a room, with the blood and humidity, nearly falls over in relief as the plastic folds and pulls back and he can get out out out. 

The living room is still full of people, and he takes a breath and closes himself down. Kara, who fed him earlier, and a pretty black girl are in the kitchen, Kara braiding the fluffiness of her hair into two tight lines down the sides of her head (he thinks he’ll see if she can cut his hair when she’s done, make him seem older, stronger, not the kind of punk kid that people take guns and trucks away from).

Someone has closed the French doors to the balcony, and the air inside seems stale, heavy, too many people breathing it, sweat and blood hanging heavy.

The little girl is awake, and wearing one of Jamie’s t-shirts for a dress, sitting in a corner and playing tug-the-sock with Marshall. Diapers? Tyler wonders, or maybe the pissing herself thing was a one-time-deal. Hopefully one of the other people will know more about kids than he does.

Dion and Eduardo are asleep on the couch, heads on opposite arms of the couch, Eduardo tucked in underneath Dion’s legs, supporting his bad one. Darius is curled up asleep in the chair, and Alfonse is leaning against the end of the couch, snoring quietly.

Jamie follows him out of the bathroom, and Tyler could use some space, time to figure out how he’s going to talk Jamie out of going with him, or how he’s going to sneak off without him.

He gathers his phone off of the island. There are a lot less supplies there than when he went to get his friends. What he thought was going to last him and Jamie nearly a month will be gone in days with this many people living off of it. Shit. 

He cradles his phone in his hands, steeling himself for the conversation. Preparing to hear the worst, or nothing at all. 

“Hey,” Jamie says to the women, “How’s it looking down there?” 

Tyler puts off making that call, puts off the moment when he hears for sure that he needs to plan a rescue or finds out that there’s no point. 

“The same,” the woman getting her hair done says, “A few more stragglers came in. They’ve got dogs now on the second-floor landings. Not much for guarding, but hopefully they’ll smell if someone is sick.”

Jamie nods, his soft sweet face so serious. “I’ll go back down in a little while.”

Kara points to a pot on the stove, a big batch of noodles and some kind of creamy sauce. “Eat before you go and you’ll be more use,” she says, and Tyler thinks he likes this girl. 

He looks back down at the black screen of his phone as Jamie fills a pair of bowls, grabs a couple Gatorades out of the fridge. 

Jamie nods towards the spare room. There had been a plan, to turn it into a guest room, but it never got past the status of office/junk room. Probably never will, now. 

Tyler opens the door and they go in together, into the blessed quiet and privacy. There’s only one office chair, so he sits against the wall, takes the food and drink that Jamie hands him and cradles it on his lap. 

Jamie starts to eat in silence, and Tyler knows he needs it, knows he worked too hard for too long earlier to skip any calories. The food is fine, but his stomach twists. He forces it down anyway, bite after bite. Not the first time he’s eaten when he didn’t want to, because he didn’t know when his next meal would come.

When he’s had as much as he can take, he sets the bowl aside and pushes his phone’s power button.

No new messages. No new texts. Not even his parents. He tries not to think about the people he knows in Dallas. Ava and her crew. Kendra and Marco. He tries to tell himself that they’re fine. That they just didn’t think to try him. He’ll check in on them, he will, but he has to try Ron and David first. Find out where they are. 

He dials their number, and ignores what it means that so few people are using the network now that a voice call can go through. 

“Hello?” Ron’s voice is threadier than Tyler remembers, tired and suddenly seeming so painfully old.

“Ron.” His own voice cracks, catches in his throat. “Ron, it’s Tyler.”

“Tyler!” his next words are muffled, like his hand is over the receiver. “David! It’s Tyler!”

“Tyler, where are you, my boy, are you safe?” David’s voice cuts in, like he picked up another phone in the house. 

“I’m good, I’m safe. I’m at Jamie’s.”

They chorus “Good good,” back at him and he cracks a brittle smile.

“Do you have food? Water? Is there power still, there?” David asks.

“Yeah. Yeah, we’re good for now. We’re fine. There’s a bunch of us. Hey, where are you at? Are you guys safe?”

There’s the slightest pause, and Tyler’s heart skips. “We’re home,” Ron says. “We’re fine. Settled in for the long haul. Have you filled the bathtubs with water yet? The washing machine too, if there’s one there. You know you can drink the water from the toilet tanks, if it comes to that.”

Tyler makes a frustrated noise. Jamie watches him, jaw set and grim.

“Yeah, we know. We’ll get the water going. Look. You can’t go outside. Have you seen it? Do you know what’s out there?”

“We know,” David says, low and serious. “The church has a phone-chain. We’ve heard.” 

“I’ll come get you,” Tyler says. “What’s your address? Where are you from the church?”

There’s another, longer, pause. 

“Oh, Tyler,” Ron says, soft and sad. “No, that’s not a good plan.”

“Jamie is coming with me,” Tyler protests. “It’s safe here. Good gates, lots of space. You’ll be safe here.”

“Tyler my boy,” David says, “Tyler, we are old, old men. At our age, it’s not a matter of if we’ll die, but choosing where, and how. We talked. We chose. We’ll do it here, in our home. We’ll do it quiet, and dignified. We won’t have you risking your life to save two useless old men.”

Tyler’s chest is tight. He can’t catch a breath. Can’t see the room for blurriness in his eyes. 

“No. Please, please no. You’re not useless. You know how to do things. Stuff we don’t know how to do. You know about the water in the toilet. We need you. You have to come.”

“Tyler,” Ron says, so kind. “Tyler, we love you. We wanted. So much for you. We wish we had started earlier. That we hadn’t been so worried about scaring you away.”

“Don’t take any shit,” David cuts in. “You make sure that man of yours knows you deserve the best. Don’t put up with it if he’s not treating you right.”

“You have to come,” Tyler says, and he hasn’t cried like this in years, tears on his face and his chest spasming. “Please. Please. Just tell me where you are.”

David sighs. “I’m sorry, my boy. I’m so so sorry. We’ll keep you in our thoughts and prayers. I wish there was more we could do for you. I wish we could help you. You need to go now. You need to prepare for the water and power to go out. If you need us, you can call us. For another couple of days, or until the phone lines go down.”

“I love you,” Tyler weeps, coughing on snot, his sorrow a deep wound that aches through his entire chest. The baby is crying too, in the other room, that tremulous little bleat that newborns make. Marshall whines, her little paws appearing under the door as she tries to dig her way under it.

“We love you too,” David says, gruff and unused to all this emotion stuff. “Now go take care of yourself. For us, if you need a reason. Keep moving forward, and you’ll get to a better place. I promise you.”

They hang up on him. Two clicks and they’re gone. It takes all Tyler’s control to not throw his phone into the wall. 

“Tyler,” Jamie says, reaching out like he can make this okay. Like it’s a good thing they don’t have to go out again. He never wanted to go, never wanted to save them. Was only in it because Tyler would have left without him. 

“Don’t touch me!” Tyler snaps, scrambles up to his feet, knocking the Gatorade over, a spreading pool of pink on the ivory carpet. “Are you happy? Are you fucking glad?” he asks, and a tiny voice in his head says this isn’t Jamie’s fault, that they wouldn’t have given the address no matter what Tyler had done, who he’d been with. It isn’t fair, but he can’t stop himself, lashing out at the closest person.

Jamie flinches like Tyler hit him, and Tyler is tempted, so fucking tempted. He turns instead, wrenches the door open. Marshall goes scrambling in through the opening, yelping and hiding behind the desk.

Tyler stalks through the living room, grabs his bat from the floor. Anything is better than staying here, wallowing in this hurt. Even bashing heads.

“Tyler, wait!” Jamie orders, like he has the right, like he’s the boss of anybody. “Stop!”

Tyler ignores him and heads for the door, throws it open, Jamie just a step behind him, reaching to grab him.

The dead man pressing against the other side of the door falls in on him, tall and broad, milky-white eyes, grasping hands. Tyler swings as he falls, the tip of the bat jamming under the guy’s jaw more by accident than intention. The jaw slams shut, teeth shatter like Tyler’s mom pissed off throwing dishes.

Tyler hits the floor, the weight crushing him down, knocking the wind out of him. 

Someone screams. Jamie steps in, reaches to grab the guy off of Tyler, but another one is pushing in the door and he has to deal with that one first, punching and shoving. 

Tyler gets his arm up against the dead guy’s throat, keeps his broken mouth shut. It makes a weird hissing through broken teeth, like it’s trying to suck the taste of Tyler’s breath into its mouth. 

Alfonse steps in beside Jamie, one of the barstools in hand, shoving the dead back. Tyler tries to hand the bat up with his other hand and the dead guy lunges in and he barely keeps it off of his face.

A hand closes around his ankle, and he kicks out with jackrabbit desperation, trying to shake them off. The weight on top of him suddenly lifts, Jamie hauling the guy off, throwing him back into the hall. Someone grabs Tyler’s arm and pulls him into the apartment, Tom and Cheekbones stepping over him and going out. Out to where the dead are, on the third fucking floor. Where they shouldn’t, can’t fucking be. 

“Shit,” Tyler rasps. Eduardo squeezes his hand as the guys push out into the hall, breaking skulls, taking the dead down.

In the sudden quiet they can hear a noise echoing from the parking garage, a clang followed by a slow rattle. The gate, hitting something and then retracting. So much noise. It’ll call them from all over. Bring them to the building and let them in. 

“The gate,” Jamie says, and Tyler reaches for his bat, pushes himself up to his feet. Shit, there were people, down there. If the garage gate opened, two cars wide and thirty seconds open between attempts to close. How many dead could be inside? How many of the people would have been cut off, caught at the ends of the corridors at the man-sized gates? Had they stood and fought or gone out into the street. Shit.

“We gotta get down there,” Tyler says. “Whatever’s blocking it, we have to get that gate closed.”


	11. Chapter 11

“We have to get that gate closed,” Tyler says, and Jamie knows it’s true, knows it has to be done. 

“We don’t know how many of them are out there,” Nikki says. “They’re gonna be all over that gate.”

As they stand there in the open doorway, the gate below clangs into something and starts its slow retraction all over again. If they fuck around too long, it could fall off the tracks, be permanently damaged somehow. Shit. However many are there, waiting will mean there’s more, not less.

A woman in a Thanksgiving-themed sweater shambles along the hall, shoulder bumping off of the wall as she comes towards their conversation. Tom steps up and cracks her skull and she crumples to the floor. 

“We have to get down there before there are too many between here and the gate,” Jamie says. 

Alfonse leans in, says something quiet to Tyler. Tyler nods. “Yeah. Yeah.” He turns and points to the wall to the left of the French doors. “The garage is in the middle, with the apartments built around it. The gate’s over that way, maybe four apartments down.”

“We need a distraction. From up here, where it’s safe,” Alfonse says. “Some folk who ain’t able to fight throw stuff outta the window, get the dead shits turned that way.”

Jamie nods. That’ll help. A lot. “If we start trying to clear from here, we might never get through to the gate to stop new ones coming in. We have to close it, and then start cleanup. We go out, fight our way to my truck, drive down. I’ll drop you off on the second and try to run over as many of them as I can while pushing whatever it is out of the way. Hopefully the gate will close then, and we can help our people down there.” 

He looks over to Kara and Eduardo and the older woman Tyler brought in. “It might be a while, before we get back.”

“We’ll keep up the distraction as long as we can,” Kara says. 

Tyler hefts his bat on his shoulder and Jamie looks at him, hesitates. 

“Please,” Tyler says, low and serious. “I fucked up. I know I fucked up. If you tell me to stay here, I will, but please don’t say that.”

Jamie frowns, not sure what the hell is going on in Tyler’s head. And he does want to tell him not to come. To stay where it’s safe. But Tyler has proven he can do this, can survive in this shit, can fight and contribute. Without a hell of a good reason, Jamie can’t ask Tyler to stay back, especially when Tyler had agreed Jamie could accompany him to get his friends.

Another of the dead is coming down the corridor. Trips on the one in the turkey sweater and goes down. Loui kicks it in the side of the head and it stops trying to get up again. Jamie checks he’s got his keys and that everybody has some kind of weapon, and then he nods. Meets Tyler’s eyes for just a moment. Wants to say _Be safe. Don’t you fucking die on me,_ but they’re a team, and Tyler’s part of that team, and if Jamie is wearing the C for this play, then he can’t have favorites, can’t take away Tyler’s place as an equal member of this team. 

They move. The ones in their hall are already dead, but four block the next turn of the corridor, and once those are down, there are half a dozen wandering around the fourth level of the parking garage. 

“Don’t waste the time,” Jamie says when Nikki goes out of her way to run one of them down. He gets to the truck, goes to the driver’s side out of habit, and then has to lean over and pop the lock so Tyler can get in before another one of them catches up to him. The others pile into the back, Tom and Loui helping Alfonse in over the side, Nikki swatting a dead from climbing up over the tailgate. 

Jamie backs out, flattening one of the dead and glancing over at Tyler, his tight-lipped face and white-knuckled hand braced against the dashboard. They drive down the low spiral ramp, and there are more on the third floor. Jamie slows down, lets the people in back thin the herd some, give them fewer to fight their way up through later. Shit. 

Just before the last curve of the garage, there’s a sudden dead-free zone. All of the shamblers either cluster at the clanking gate or have scattered up and outward already. Jamie stops the truck as soon as he can see the gate.

A VW bug is crashed against the wall right at the gate, like the driver had tried to outrun the gate, or rush in the second it opened and misjudged the angle. The people are gone, but the dead swarm over the area, drawn in by the noise. 

Tyler bangs on the back window and gestures the fighters in the truck’s bed to get out. 

“What?” Jamie asks. 

“We have to knock the car out of the way, and then block the other side with the truck. The dead on the tracks are stopping the gate too.”

Jamie watches as the gate clanks and reverses direction, a foot short of hitting the car. There’s a dead woman on the ground, nearly cut in half but still writhing. They’re going to have to hold back the tide while the four from the back get to the track and clear it. 

“Use the back bumper,” Tyler says, and there’s something calm about him, like that day when they were playing pool and the rednecks came in making trouble. “Push the car back just a little, and then back in beside it, as tight as you can get.”

Jamie figures it’s a good idea to keep the truck operational, that the front’s a lot easier to fuck up than the back. He nods and makes a six-point turn, crushing as many of the clustered dead as he can, grinding them against the walls, hitting them with the truck’s big tires. The fighters are already moving in, hitting the dead from the back while they are distracted by the truck and its noise. 

Jamie puts his back bumper to the corner of the Beetle, pushes it back. The wheels are fucked and it curves, taking up even more space than it had before. 

“Good, good,” Tyler murmurs, twisted around in his seat to watch. “Okay, now back up beside it. Block as much of the space as you can.”

Jamie pulls forward and then puts it in reverse. The tires spin on the wet floor, bump over what used to be a person. The side of the truck grinds the car’s rear quarter-panel, but he gets it in place.

The dead are on the truck before it even stops moving, hands smacking at the side windows, trying to claw through the glass. Tyler’s plan was horrible, he thinks. Except it’s really not. Tom is beating down the few who can get in past the truck, bodies piling up soon to fill the gap (the gap that Tyler and Jamie will have to go through to get to safety, oh shit they are so fucked). Loui heaves bodies off of the track while Nikki and Alfonse watch their backs from those wandering down the ramp. He’s not even sure he’ll be able to open his door, so many of the dead are smashing up against their side.

“Tyler,” Jamie says, “I need you to know. I need you to know that I never could have got on that plane without you. That I didn’t stay because I felt obligated. Tyler, I…”

“What?” Tyler asks, distracted. “Watch your face.” He reaches up and grabs the rear-view mirror with his left hand, snaps it off with one hit of the bat and drops it in the floorboards. 

The gate starts to close and Jamie hopes it makes it shut. Wonders if there are too many behind them for the truck to push through. Maybe they can go backwards, get around to a different gate, get in again. Tom and Loui step back, and the gate makes it to within a foot of closed before it hits a corpse and starts to retract.

Jamie looks at the massed wall of seething hunger outside the door. They’ll just follow the truck. Him and Tyler will get swarmed wherever they try to get out. They’re fucked, so damn fucked. “Tyler. I lo—”

Tyler punches up with the tip of the bat, a well-aimed shot at the upper right corner of the windshield. Jamie flinches back from the violence of it, the crack of metal hitting. The glass spiderwebs and bulges outward, held together by the plastic coating. Jamie looks beyond the glass, at the opening gate, nothing unfriendly between them and the fighters. 

“Oh!” he says, and Tyler swings one more time at the glass and then passes Jamie the bat. Jamie starts softening up the windshield as Tyler gets his feet up, starts kicking the glass out of the glue and rubber that holds it in place. It stays mostly in one piece, heavy and folding into ragged angles. It’ll fall left, on the driver’s side, on the most-vulnerable edge of the hood of the truck. 

Jamie gets up into the seat, uses the bat to give his hands some protection, puts his shoulder into it. The glass buckles out, the gap on Tyler’s side growing wider and wider. The gate hits full-open and in a few seconds it will try to close again. 

Tyler wriggles out of the windshield, and Jamie passes him the bat. Tyler pulls the glass from the outside and Jamie pushes from the inside. The edge isn’t sharp, not like the razor-edged shards that normal glass breaks into, but the little cubes are harsh and angular, smeared red where Tyler’s hands grab at it. 

The last edge of glue gives way and Tyler shoves it to the side. The dead don’t try to catch it, and it smashes down on a whole row of them. He reaches down, hand clasped around Jamie’s wrist, dragging him up out of the cab. There aren’t a whole lot of times in his life Jamie can remember feeling too big, too tall, bones too long. Guys his size weren’t meant to crawl out of a windshield, and it takes longer than it should. Just as he’s about to tell Tyler _fuck it, go!_ he gets his foot on the hood, pulls his other leg through and he’s out, they’re clear.

They dance across the truck’s hood and slide down the front grill, slip past the gate seconds before it rumbles closed, all the way to the wall and stops. Closed. Even more secure than it was before, with the two vehicles keeping the dead from pressing in on it. Alfonse does something violent to the motor, muttering about not doing this shit again.

“Fuck!” Tyler says, with feeling, and all Jamie can do is nod and try to catch his breath, elbows on his knees, heart beating wild with adrenaline. 

In the absence of the gate’s rattle, they can hear a smash on the street, the back half of the horde turning and going to go see if it’s something they can eat. 

“So that went well,” Nikki says, nodding towards the dead who have wandered back their way. More coming, their moans echoing down the corridors. 

“Up,” Jamie pants. “We go up the ramp, so they can’t surround us. If they’re still a problem when we get to the roof, we’ll have room to run circles around them.”

Tyler glances to the side, to where they all know the other gates are, to where their people were. 

“We can’t help them if we get pinned down and surrounded,” Jamie says, hating that he might be heading away from people who are still alive, but Loui nods and Tyler swallows hard and heads up, taking down the first creature to come up on them. 

They fight, up to the roof of the garage and back down through the stragglers, until Jamie’s muscles are shaking and Tyler stumbles along like one of _them_ beside him, only moving fast when it’s time to swing, to strike. 

They get back down the ramp to the ground floor, and head for the south gate, Tom and Loui trailing rear-guard, Jamie and Tyler taking point. 

“Oh god,” Tyler breathes as they turn the last corner. Things are still moving between them and the gate, but nothing is alive. Chet is bent backwards over the stair railing, neck broken, throat torn out, his teeth clicking together over and over, mechanically. Jamie ends him, sick with the sight of it, with his failure to help, to save anybody.

“Come on,” Tyler says, looking back the way they came. They turn and head back, past the garage to the other small gate. More of the same, blood and carnage. They go back and double-clear the garage, and then split up, up the stairs to the second floor. 

Nikki said they’d gotten dogs to check the incoming for illness. The Great Dane from the fourth floor, with his displaced hips and floppy jowls, is torn open on the second floor landing, leash still tied to the rail. Somehow that hits Jamie harder than the people, who could at least have tried to fight. His breath catches, and Tyler puts a hand on his back and pushes, keeps him moving. 

“Stay here,” Tyler tells Nikki and Alfonse. “We’ll clear the halls to Tom and Loui and come back to you.”

They clear, arms aching and heartsick. Jamie doesn’t know how many of the living are left in the complex now, how many new people got in, or how many they lost in the gate’s failure. They go from Nikki and Alfonse to Tom and Loui, a quick look in the garage to see if anything is moving around there. They go up to the third, and they could send someone else, but it’s Jamie and Tyler again, and that’s okay. There are fewer of the dead still moving here. They’ll do this, maybe let Tom and Loui do the fourth floor. Clear the roof and come back down. There’s a chance, that one or two are slipping past them; they’ll have to be careful, even inside the gates for a while, but the acute danger of the day will be past.

Tyler chops down a skinny dude with half his face chewed off. Jamie steps up to take the next one. The door between them opens, a man rushing out, living-person fast. 

Jamie has just enough time to react to the knife in the man’s hand by swinging his pole, blocking it away from his body.

“You!” the guy, the asshole who had harassed Tyler, who wanted Jamie to leave Tyler and all the rest of the people out there. “You did this! Over that!” he gestures wild with the knife. His sleeve is bit open, the arm underneath bleeding. “Over some fucking jailbait piece of ass, you killed us! You killed us all!” 

He rushes Jamie, and Jamie grabs his arm as they go down, fighting for control of the knife.

The thunk of aluminum on skull is so familiar by now, but Jamie has never seen the life fade from another person’s eyes before, not up close like this. The guy’s gaze loses focus, his mouth falling open. Tyler swings again, the force of the hit going through Jamie’s arms as he holds the guy’s body off of him. 

Tyler kicks the dude to the side, hissing mad, “Fuck you, Mark,” he says, but Mark is gone, the back of his head sitting flat on the cement of the corridor. 

Tyler’s legs shake and he stumbles back to the wall, rests his shoulder-blades against it and slides down to his ass. 

“Fuck it all,” Tyler whispers, eyes closed. Jamie rolls over and crawls to him. Rests his head against Tyler’s temple for long minutes while they get their breath back.

“You had to,” Jamie says, because killing people who are already dead is a different thing than killing someone who’s just dying. He knows, because he’s not sure he could have done it, as clear as the need was. 

Tyler coughs and nudges him, uses the bat like a cane to get back on his feet. “We’re almost done,” he says, like he knows that clearing this building is just the beginning. “Almost done.”


	12. Chapter 12

Tyler is stumbling by the time they make one last pass of the building, forces spread even thinner to make sure none of the dead have slipped past them, tap-tapping the railings of the stairs and the cars in the garage to draw them out to where they can be put down. 

His feet are past hurt and into numb, his shoulders aching. Jamie leads them back to his apartment door and knocks on it. His keys are still in the truck, and Tyler isn’t sure how they’ll ever get them back. 

“It’s us. All clear,” Jamie says at the door, an edge of authority in his voice, like he’s trying to take on the tone and words of some action movie. Like he’s trying to be _more_ , like he feels he has to be.

Tyler leans against the brick, closes his eyes and rests while they wait for Eduardo to open it, his dark eyes checking them over as he lets them in. 

“Took for fucking ever,” Eduardo murmurs to Tyler, worry and question in his voice.

“Gate’s good,” Tyler manages to say back. “Fixed it. But everybody down there. They’re dead. They fucking…dead.” He shakes his head, can’t meet anybody’s eyes.

Kara hands out bowls of food and bottles of water. Tyler is confused for a moment, how he’s supposed to take both, the bat in his hand like a part of him, like it’s attached and he forgot how to set it down. It’s like taking off his own arm to open his hand and lay it on the island. Shouldn’t put it there, messy with blood and brains. Not where people are gonna cook. He’s just too tired to figure out a better place, some other place to put something so gruesome. 

Loui goes in to see his wife and their new baby, but everybody else stays in the main room, Jamie by the sink, and Tyler gravitates to him. 

He doesn’t realize he’s staring at his food and not eating, too tired to function, until Jamie takes his plate. 

“Water first,” Jamie says, and Tyler would normally balk at being bossed around, but right now he can use all the assistance he can get. 

The bottle is slippery with condensation, and he can’t get a good grip of the lid. Something. Something wrong with his hands and the bottle falls from his fingers, bounces off of the flooring. 

“Fuck,” Tyler mutters, watching it roll away. He regrets its loss, but not nearly enough to go chasing after it. He looks down at his traitorous hands. He’s not cut up too bad from the glass. It had broke into right angles and not into dangerous slivers or shards. They aren’t scabbed up, too much fighting, gripping the bat’s handle, damp with sweat, but they aren’t bleeding much either. A row of broken blisters cross above the cuts, and the web of his thumb is raw. It’s a mess, more than he can deal with now, and he’ll fuck with it later.

Eduardo picks his water up and twists the cap off. “The fuck you do to yourself?” he asks, and Jamie perks up at that, stops shoveling stew into his mouth and looks over.

“It’s not too bad,” Tyler says. He doesn’t want to mess with this tonight, except that something is wrong, and he’s too fucking tired to figure out what, or how to fix it. He looks over at the bat, thinks maybe not knowing where his weapon is is what’s messing him up.

The bat is smudged red from tip to grip. Bloody. Their blood and his. He looks down at his hands. Their blood and his. 

“Oh fuck!” His plate hits the floor, splattering stew and broken china everywhere. He turns to the sink, turns the knob to hot water, full blast, sticks his hands under it while it’s still cold. 

“Tyler, what?” Jamie asks, hand warm and strong on his back. Tyler scrubs at the cuts, hisses at the sting. 

“Blood. I got their blood on me. In me. Shit. Shit.”

“Hey,” Jamie says, taking his wrists, helping him hold steady under the warm stream. “You’re okay. You’re okay. Hey. Look. If it’s blood-borne, then we’re all fucked, we’re all sick.”

Tyler shakes his head, doesn’t understand. 

“We’ve all got some scrape or cut by now. We’ve been fighting these things without goggles. The way we’ve been hitting them, it spatters, it…”

Jamie looks around like someone can help him explain this. 

“We’d all be sick,” Kara repeats. “That guy. That Jamie put in the bathroom. He was bit. He was sick. It was quicker than this. A couple hours.”

Tyler’s hands are shaking, and Jamie gently uncurls his fingers, stretching the skin of his palms so the water can get in there. He thinks he should believe them, but he’s too tired for logic, too tired to make it make sense. 

When his hands are clean, Jamie presses him into one of the dining chairs, and Ofelia comes up with a tube of antibiotic gel and a handful of t-shirt strips. Eduardo brings his water while they bandage him up, a straw sticking out of the top of it so he can drink. People are talking but he’s having a hard time tracking the conversation. He drinks when the straw is there, opens his mouth to eat when there’s a loaded spoon instead. 

“You’re okay,” Jamie repeats when Tyler thinks he’s had about all he can take, and lifts him out of the chair. Tyler stumbles over his own feet, wonders if that’s the beginning of it, walking like the dead. He lets Eduardo and Jamie lead him to the office, and he remembers the way he’d left it. It seems like a year ago. 

“Sorry,” he says, and it doesn’t sound right, enough. “I fucking. Not your fault. Ron and David. Not your fault.”

“It’s okay,” Jamie says, and Tyler doesn’t deserve that. 

“Shouldn’t have yelled at you,” he tries. “Shouldn’t have let the dead guy in.”

Jamie says something, but Tyler only has enough brain-power for one thing at a time and he’s distracted by the room right now. He blinks around and the layout is different, the desk and chair up against the wall, a huge nest of pillows and blankets and couch cushions that didn’t come from Jamie’s couch filling most of the floor.

“The fuck?” he asks, panic rising in his chest, fear for the people he’d been fighting to protect. “You went _out_ for blankets?” He looks at Eduardo, eyes wide.

Eduardo shakes his head. “I look stupid to you?” He scoffs. “Remember that foreclosed squat we were crashing at down on Peak street?” 

Tyler blinks, trying to figure out what that has to do with anything. 

“You know how whoever was there before cut up the walls and we slipped through when the cops showed up?” Tyler does remember that. Kind of. “We were trying to find shit to throw out the window, and we were gonna run out or throw something important, so I punched through with a screwdriver and we knocked a hole from closet to closet and got into the apartment next door.”

“Oh,” Tyler says, feeling dumb. Of course Eduardo wouldn’t go out if he didn’t have to. 

“That’s good work,” Jamie says. “We’ll have to see how far we can cut through.” He lowers Tyler down to the palette, and Tyler’s eyes are slipping closed even before his body is completely down. 

Eduardo leaves, and Jamie settles in close. They reek of sweat and blood.

The door opens, and Eduardo comes back in, Tyler’s bat in his hand and Marshall tucked under his arm.

“Thought you’d sleep better with these,” he says. When he puts her down, she runs to wriggle in between Tyler and Jamie, her little tail thwapping them in her excitement. 

“Oh,” Tyler says again, and rests his bandaged hand on her back. She’s warm and sweet and soft, untouched by all this.

He looks up, and Eduardo is already at the door. 

“Water,” Tyler says as a thought hits him.

“I’ll bring you some,” Eduardo assures him. 

“No. Here. Not gonna last. We have to fill a tub or something.”

“Ofelia is on it. Got two tubs and all the sinks next door full. We’ll work on some more in the morning.”

Tyler nods. Something else is nagging at his thoughts but he can’t pin it down.

“’Kay. Thanks.”

Eduardo gives a little nod and turns to go, but there are people in the way, Tom and Cheekbones, coming into the room, pillows and blankets under their arms.

“Huh?” Jamie asks, and if Tyler had more energy he’d give him shit for the lack of smooth.

“Heard what you said,” Tom tells him. “About us all being sick. Exposure.”

“Mikaela. Elle. I can’t hurt them. Can’t be with them until I know,” Cheekbones says, his voice ragged. Jamie sits up.

“No, I meant…”

Alfonse comes through the door. Eduardo manages to squirm out past them all.

“I didn’t go through all that to be the reason these women and kids get killed,” Alfonse says, closing the door behind him. 

“Oh yay sleepover.” Tyler isn’t sure if he means it sarcastically or not. 

The men spread themselves out, Tom and Cheekbones picking one wall, Alfonse another. Tom hits the light switch, the room going dark except for the faint glow of the streetlamps outside. Tyler thinks they’re reassuring to see. Power’s still on. At least for now.

They settle down, their breathing close and rough in the closed in space. The door opens again, Nikki hovering at the threshold. 

“You got room in there for one more, Jamie?” she asks. 

Jamie grunts, moves him and Tyler away from their wall, making room for her in the corner. Tyler lays in his new spot, disoriented by the loss of the anchoring structure beside him. 

“Yeah. Come on.”

Nikki picks her way across to them, bumps Tyler’s knee as she settles. Marshall squirms in his arms and nudges his face with her cool nose. 

Nikki is nicer to have by him than the wall, warm and not-so-hard. 

“This okay?” she asks, shoulder pressed against his spine. He grunts, closes his eyes again. 

Tyler dreams, more vividly than he can ever remember. Dreams he fucked up somehow, ended up in a men’s shelter, thin mattresses laid out on the floor, a foot of room between them, the smell of flop sweat and stale cigarettes and liquor sick in the air. 

Dreams he’s awake in the backseat of his parents’ car, his sisters wedged in on either side, listening to his father whisper “I just wanted him to be something…”

Dreams he’s in Boston, in some ratty hotel room, so drunk he can’t stand, hands on him, fingers pushing into his mouth, into his throat, cracking his jaw apart, fingers clawing for his heart.

Dreams he’s in Mark’s apartment, his mind filling in the lack of details with a vague understanding of place. He’s there on Mark’s couch, Dead-Mark in front of him, his skull crushed crooked, the skin hanging torn off of half his face. One hand behind Tyler’s head, holding him still, a glass in the other full of blood and guts. Tyler tries to push him back but his hands are soft, spongy. 

“You’ll drink it,” Mark says through his broken teeth. “You’ll hold still and fucking drink it.”

==========

Tyler startles awake, gasping like there are hands on his throat. 

Jamie’s been awake for a while, lying in the near-dark, listening for any change in his team’s breathing, listening for danger from outside or in.

He puts a hand on Tyler’s chest, murmurs “You’re okay. You’re okay.” Tyler sits up and jerks away, his breath ragged. Jamie lets him go, and Tyler pulls his knees up, rests his forehead on them. He looks young, and it breaks Jamie’s heart, that he can’t do anything to get Tyler out of this situation. That they’re both trapped in this shit.

“You feel okay?” Jamie asks, and Tyler nods, doesn’t raise his head. Jamie groans and climbs to his feet, his legs and back and shoulders sore from the day’s work. If he’s feeling this shitty, then the others, Tyler and Alfonse and Nikki, have to be worse, not used to nearly the extreme workouts professional hockey players put themselves through on a weekly basis.

“Help me up?” Tyler rasps.

Jamie reaches down, and Tyler raises a bandaged hand to him. Jamie grabs his wrist and pulls him up. Leads the way out of the quarantine room and out to the living room. Nobody is there, the couch cushions have been taken away. The door to the master bedroom is closed, and Jamie expects it’s barricaded too, with Eduardo and Dion on the other side. It looks like they’ve made it through, that nobody got sick. He tries to do the math, figure out the earliest that Neal could have been bitten, how long it was before he started having a fever, started looking sick. 

Tyler looks like hell in the harsh overhead lights of the kitchen. Pale and marked with bruises and streaks of dried blood. 

Jamie has had time to think, lying awake on the floor with the rest of them. Time to think about what are achievable goals and what are pipe dreams now. He wants to tell Tyler first, get his feedback, but Tyler is glassy-eyed and exhausted. 

“What do you want to eat?” Jamie asks. He doesn’t think Tyler will find the energy to feed himself without a nudge.

Tyler turns towards the fridge but doesn’t open it, staring like he can see through the doors.

“We should start eating the stuff that won’t keep,” he says. “Save the cans for later. Maybe even the freezer stuff, if the power lasts.”

Jamie opens the fridge, pokes through. There’s a lot more there than he remembers. Three different cartons of eggs, all different brand names. 

“You bring all this?” he asks. 

Tyler peers past him. 

“Not me.” He pushes the pile of groceries on the island around until there’s room for his ass and then hops up, wincing at the effort.

Jamie gets the eggs out. Tyler’s a lot better cook than him, but he can manage eggs.

Nikki stumbles out of the bedroom, mumbles something something and curls up in the living room chair and goes back to sleep.

Tom comes out just after her, hair askew and as blood-spattered and worn as the rest of them. 

“I’m making eggs,” Jamie tells him, and he grunts, comes over and takes one of the barstools. Jamie thinks the stool Alfonse had used to push the dead back is still in the hall. They’ll have to deal with that, the bodies, before it becomes a health hazard.

Jamie ends up putting a full dozen eggs into his biggest skillet, cook on low, stir often.

“So you two?” Tom asks.

Jamie glances over to see a thread of tension twitch on Tyler’s face. He wishes they’d had time to talk it over earlier, but trying to keep their relationship under cover isn’t going to work at this point. He finds it is kind of a relief.

“Yeah,” Jamie says, trusting that Tom wouldn’t bring it up in front of Jamie’s boyfriend if he had a problem with gay people. Their existence is too tenuous here for bad manners or unnecessary friction.

Tom’s lips twitch in a tired smile. “Phillip said no, on the way home that night.” It feels like a lifetime ago, the four of them hanging out, Tom and Phillip, Jamie and Tyler, eating chili and playing video games. 

Jamie stirs the eggs. “So we’re cool?”

“Yeah,” Tom says. 

Jamie looks over his shoulder, sees Tom turn towards Tyler.

“That day. When he come home to you. I thought ‘Oh. Jamie Benn. I never saw him for real before this.’”

Tyler snorts, but his smile is small and pleased. 

The bedroom door starts to open, stops short with a thud and then swings the rest of the way clear. Jamie grabs hold of the pan’s handle and Tyler wraps his hand around a can of peas.

“I’m okay,” Loui calls, stumbling out, rubbing his head. “I’m okay.” 

Jamie sighs and Tom says something chiding in Swedish. 

“There’s eggs in a minute,” Jamie says, and Tyler hops down to get the paper plates. It could be just another morning, Jamie playing host to his teammates and Tyler’s friends. Could be the normal he’d never have dared to claim. 

He lets the illusion play out, Tyler going to get Alfonse up, Jamie eating his eggs while he cooks the next dozen for the people in the other room. The baby cries, and Dion’s little brother is the first out, heading to the food like a moth to flame. 

Nobody’s talking about the ugly reality outside their door, and for as long as breakfast takes, Jamie keeps quiet.


	13. Chapter 13

Tyler eats his eggs. He watches Jamie. Tries to figure out if Jamie’s weirdness is just end-of-the-world weird, or if there’s something going on. There’s an aura of anticipation to the man, like he’s waiting for everyone to get cleaned up and eat, for Cheekbones to get back from spending a little time with his family.

He watches Jamie put down his empty plate and gather himself. He takes a breath, and Tyler’s aren’t the only eyes on him.

Jamie looks to Cheekbones first, “Loui, I don’t want to leave Mikaela out, but I don’t think there’s space in that room for all of us.”

Cheekbones, Loui, nods. “She’s in no shape,” he says, an Tyler worries for her, this lady he never met, that she’s having a rough time after having a baby, with no doctors around.

Jamie nods back. Tyler looks around the island, at Jamie’s people, Kara and Nikki, the two hockey players. His own folk, Alfonse and Darius, Dion, Eduardo and Ofelia. 

“We need to start a rough plan,” Jamie says, forgetting to raise his head, color on his cheeks like he thinks he’s taking something that isn’t his. The rest are watching like they expect him to make it, to tell them what to do. 

Jamie clears his throat when nobody steps in to take the speech over from him. “It worked pretty good last night, on the gate, to have an inside team and an outside team. You guys did great work getting through the walls and scrounging in the other apartments while we were out there.” He does look around then, meets the gaze of the ‘inside-team’ just as long as the people who had fought beside him. 

Eduardo murmurs softly to Ofelia, translating for her.

Jamie licks his lips. “Can uh, can somebody take notes?” 

Eduardo goes to get his sketchpad out of his backpack, flips to an empty page and puts it on the middle of the island. Jamie goes to pass it to Tyler, and no, that would be no use to anybody. He flinches away from the book, cannot do this job. Jamie frowns and passes it to Kara instead. She rolls her eyes, but takes it. Tyler doesn’t get the push-back-- he just figures she’s the best at writing English. Alfonse hadn’t looked eager to take the job, and the hockey dudes have enough of an accent that they don’t need to be listening, translating and writing at the same time.

“Okay,” Jamie says, gathering steam. “If anybody else has ideas, just jump in.” He looks around like he hopes someone will. 

Tyler gives him a nod, a _you aren’t fucking this up_ silent support. 

“Outside team, I see we’ve got three jobs today. We need to double check that the premises are clear of creeps. We need to clear away the bodies, and we need to see who else in the building is still alive besides us.”

“The office,” Tyler puts in. “We need to make sure the doors between the office and the ground floor halls is still locked and strong. Fill up that hall with junk if we have to.”

Jamie nods, and Kara writes it down.

“How long are we planning for?” Nikki asks. “How long can we live here?” 

Jamie chews on his lips.

“I think…we plan on as long as we can hold out,” Jamie says, and Loui doesn’t look happy, Kara looks pained. 

“Take Hurricane Katrina, multiply it by how fucked up it is out there, how fucked up it is everywhere, and we can’t count on anybody ever comin’ to help us,” Dion says. 

“If anybody wants to leave, you’re free to.” It would have come out like a threat from anybody else, but Jamie makes it sound like an honest offer. “If you’ve got somewhere to go, run it by us and we can decide if it’s worth trying to get all of us there. If anybody else wants to come in, we’ll help them if we can, but we can’t run ourselves down to nothing trying to clear the whole damn street.”

There are a lot of grim faces, but nobody argues. Nobody offers somewhere else.

Jamie lets that hang for a moment and then goes on. 

“Is there anything Inside-team needs from us? Is there anything we can do for Mikaela or the baby?” 

Eduardo and Ofelia have a short conversation, but shake their heads in the end. “The stuff she needs, we’ll be looking for in the other apartments. If we don’t find it today, we’ll have to make a different plan tomorrow.”

Jamie nods. “What’s your day looking like? Do you need someone more physical in here? How many apartments do you think you can get into today?”

“We found a hammer,” Eduardo says, “So we’ll be going through faster now. It can’t be too far that way until we hit the firewall, but we should be able to at least open up four or five today without going out the door.”

“How’s the food situation?”

Kara puts down her pen. “I was thinking,” she starts, and then catches herself like she hadn’t planned on talking, gathers her nerve and begins again. “The freezers have raw meat in them, food that we can’t eat without cooking it. I thought I could go into the opened apartments, and cook whatever’s there, bag it and put it back in the freezer, and pack the freezer solid with baggies of water. Salt water, so it’ll be colder than regular ice. If the electricity stays on for long enough for it to freeze hard, it could be a week maybe, after the power goes out, before the freezers get warmer than a fridge should be.”

Jamie nods, and Kara looks down, picks up her pen and writes it down.

“I ain’t much good for walking, but I can sit on a stool and help with that,” Dion offers. He’s doing okay sitting on a stool for the meeting, so Tyler thinks he’s telling the truth.

Jamie frowns. “I’m not expecting a perfect number, but about how many days food do we have right now?”

Kara shrugs, looks to Ofelia while Eduardo translates.

“Two days here,” Eduardo says, “Hopefully a day each in every other one of the apartments, a little more if we are able to use most of it in the right order. If the power holds, if we get in soon.”

Jamie nods like that’s not a terrible surprise. “Assuming there’s nobody else here to share it with,” he adds, and they all agree.

Eduardo and Ofelia have another short conversation. “We’ll make a list. She says there are some things that would be better to plant than eat.”

That idea hits Tyler sick in his gut, that they think it’s gonna be however the fuck long it takes to grow food before the world comes back. 

Then Dion quips “Don’t forget the ketchup.”

“When you’re scraping bottom,” Tyler says to Jamie’s bewildered stare, “you go to Mickey D’s and order the smallest fry and then get about this many packs of ketchup.” He cups his hands like he’s holding a cereal bowl. 

“Ketchup don’t go bad too quick, even outta the fridge,” Dion adds. 

“There’s a lot of calories in condiments,” Kara says. “Ask anybody who’s ever been on a diet.” 

“These people ain’t gonna eat ketchup soup,” Alfonse grumps, and Dion snorts at him like _wait until they get hungry._

Jamie looks like he’s torn between pity and disgust at the idea. 

“Ofelia is going to be mostly on maternity-ward duty?” he asks to get off the subject, and Eduardo nods. 

“She can do some of the cooking and packing, but the little mama needs a nurse on hand most of the time.”

Tyler can do the math on how this is gonna go down in his head. They’re down to Eduardo and Darius cutting through walls, and that’s not going to get them very far very fast.

Eduardo makes a grimace as Jamie looks away, but doesn’t let it out.

“You got something?” Tyler asks.

“The internet,” Eduardo says. Jamie looks blank like he’d forgotten it exists. Tyler kind of had.

“When we lose power, we lose access to the internet. You got any questions, better ask them now. I could start researching anything that seems important, print it out so we’d have it later. If I had a printer. And a computer”

“I got that,” Jamie says, sounding surprised. “We’ll get you set up here.”

“Okay,” Eduardo says, “I’ll start research. If anybody finds another printer, or more paper, bring it here.” He looks around, trying to figure out who the job of tossing apartments is falling to. Darius’ eyebrows go up. He’s the only one of that crew without a job.

“Okay, looks like inside-team has more work than hands,” Jamie decides.

Tyler waits for it, for Jamie to stick him somewhere safe, while he stays out knee-deep in the shit. 

“Loui,” Jamie says, and Tyler tries to keep the shock off of his face. “You’ve got a wife, a new baby. I think Mikaela would feel better with you closer.”

For just a second, it looks like Loui might protest, but then he rubs a hand over his face, nods. “Yeah. I’ll take first shift of that. But if someone outside needs to trade off…” trying to save face, trying not to look relieved. 

“Does anybody not know what they’re doing today?” Jamie asks. 

Darius raises his hand. The kid is nine years old. 

Jamie ponders.

“For the morning, I’m going to leave you on Kara’s team. Do what she says, help your brother.”

Darius nods, taking his job very seriously.

Jamie jerks his head decisively. “Okay then. Outside team, let’s be ready to go in ten minutes.”

The group breaks apart, Jamie heading into the ‘office’ room to get his computer and printer, Ofelia going to check on Mikaela, other people heading to the bathroom or wherever. Tyler thinks about grabbing a shower, but he’ll just be a mess again an hour later anyway.

Tom reaches for Alfonse’s sleeve, pulls him aside before they can all split up. 

“Hey,” Tyler hears him say. Tom pauses, parsing the right words in English. “We’ll eat what you eat,” he finally settles on. 

Alfonse looks him up and down, takes in his sweat stains and blood spatters. “Yeah,” he says. Not-quite disbelieving. 

Through the open door to the office, Tyler hears Jamie’s phone ring, already a strange sound in the quiet new world. Jamie’s voice is high and sharp and urgent as he answers “Jordie!?”


	14. Chapter 14

The ring of the phone sets Jamie’s heart pounding, the oh-shit suddenness of it, the sheer fucking volume, the way contact from outside has already become a strange, alien thing.

He digs it out of his pocket, sees Jordie’s name as he accepts the call. Terror, for a second, that Jordie is _here_ somehow, that Jordie is outside.

“Jordie!?” he answers, clutching the phone too tight, trying to calm his voice, his breathing. “Jordie, where are you?”

“Home. Mom and dad’s place,” Jordie answers, keyed up in a way Jamie is not used to hearing. “Shit! Jamie! I’ve been trying to call.”

“What’s happening? Are you okay?” 

“Not us, dumbass. Jesus. The news. Half the US is like a blackout. Nobody knows anything. There’s nothing coming out. They said. They said _dead people_ are walking around!”

Jamie takes a shuddering breath.

“Yeah. Yeah. It’s like. It’s like a fucking war zone or something. Everybody. Jesus. There’s twelve of us. Everybody else. They’re all. Fuck. I don’t know. So many dead. And they’re all. Fuck.”

“I’ll come get you,” Jordie says, serious and determined. “You at your apartment? Shit, mom has the address, right? They’re patrolling the coast. The island is shut off. They sunk the ferries. They’re bulldozing the airport landing strips. I’ll get a boat though, I’ll—”

“Are you kidding me!?” Jamie cuts in, high and near-frantic. He paces, stumbles on the piles of pillows and kicks them out of the way. “No. Fucking no. Look. Mom and Dad need you. You’ve gotta. You have to get as much food as you can. You have to… Shit.” 

He can’t do it, can’t plan their survival at the same time he’s fighting for his own. 

“Shit, Jordie, however bad you think it could be, you plan on it being twice that bad. You gotta plan long and plan for the worst. The worst fucking thing you can think of.”

“Jamie,” Jordie says, his voice catching. “Jamie, I gotta come get you.” 

Jamie can hear the tears in his brother’s voice, knows that this is Jordie accepting the shitty reality. 

“I know you want to. I know you would if you could.” 

A frustrated groan slips between Jordie’s teeth.

“Hey. I’m not sure how long the phones are going to work. But I’ll try to call you when I get back in.” He’s aware of his team, waiting on him to lead them. 

“Jamie…” Jordie whimpers, and Jamie wants to reassure him.

“I’ve got good people here,” he says. “Two of the guys from my team. Tyler. Some guys he brought. We’re solid. We’re going to make it through this.”

“I’ll come,” Jordie promises. “Not now. When this shit is over. I’ll come to Dallas and I’ll fucking find you.”

“I’ll see you then,” Jamie says, trying to ignore how hollow the promise seems, how easily plans fall apart. “I’ll be here. We’ll be here.”

He looks over and Loui is waiting at the door, a lime-green-handled hammer in hand. Right. They’ve been cutting through closets, and wouldn’t have started at the one in the baby’s room.

“I gotta go,” he tells his brother. “Jordie. Jordie, I love you. Tell mom and dad and Jenny. Don’t let them forget it. I’ll see you as soon as I can.”

“I love you, Jamie,” Jordie says, the words he has always used so freely seeming heavy and real now.

“I gotta go,” Jamie says again. The guys are waiting. Shit needs doing.

“Love you,” Jordie says one last time and hangs up.

=========================

Jamie hangs up with his brother and nods Loui to the closet. Loui opens the door, and there is a narrow cut between two studs, white gypsum powder everywhere, someone else’s clothes hanging on the other side, luggage stacked neatly against the other wall, waiting for its owner’s return. The hole is short, and Loui takes the time to make it bigger, using the whole width between the boards, raising the height until he doesn’t have to crawl to get through.

Dion and Kara go through next, him limping heavy, his bad leg bound to something stiff and straight, her supporting him, Darius following. 

Jamie takes a breath, trying to separate here from home, these people and this job from his parents and siblings that are going to be in the shit sooner than he’d ever want. Here is here. Now is now, and he’s got a fucking job to do.

Tyler is standing in the doorway, watching him like he thinks Jamie is going to fuck off to Canada in the next ten minutes. Jamie wants to tell him it’s not going to happen. That he’s in, that there’s no choice but to be all in, but he can’t find the words, can’t trust himself to say them without breaking to pieces, and there’s no time for that. He bites his lip, and nods, and hopes Tyler understands.

Jamie turns away, focuses on what he came in here for. Gets his laptop in one hand, the printer under the other arm and carries it out for Eduardo. Has a ludicrous flash of _oh shit, my search history_ imagining what the kid will find on it. 

But Eduardo is no child, has a boyfriend, has done who-knows-what for fun or survival. There’s nothing in Jamie’s very mild porn preferences that’s going to shock him, if he even takes the time to peek.

“Here. It’s. There’s no password. Help yourself.”

Eduardo nods, lifts the laptop’s cover, starts powering it up. “Okay, thanks. You guys out there, you think of stuff we need to research, and when we take a break for lunch I’ll take your list.”

Jamie nods. Tyler is at the door with his bat, the rest still getting ready, gathering their weapons. Jamie folds a piece of paper towel into a strip over the worst of his blisters from yesterday, winds a loop of tape over that. He passes the roll over to Tyler to reinforce his bandages. 

“I want to start with a sweep of the inside and a check of the gates,” Jamie starts. “I don’t want to get caught with them behind us.”

They open the door like they’re expecting a replay of the previous day, ready for a hoard of dead to come in, but it’s all quiet.

“Shit,” Tyler chokes, covering his mouth and reeling back. 

The dead stink, bodily fluids settled and seeping out of the half-dozen in the hallway overnight. Thank fuck it’s not summer; he can’t even imagine how bad it could be. The mild Texas November is bad enough. Jamie clenches his jaw. “Out,” he says, nudging Tyler’s shoulder. “Let’s get this door closed.” He’d kind of like to have a place to go back to that doesn’t smell like shit and rot.

Tyler goes through, bat at the ready, but there’s nothing moving in the corridor. A light breeze blows from the garage end of it, to the open end by the north stairs. Jamie can’t decide if it’s helping or not.

They make a pass, from the top of the garage, through every level’s corridors, making sure there are no ugly surprises.

“When we’re done,” Tyler says, “we should tie some string or something over the stairs and the openings to the garage. So we’ll know if any of them are in and moving around.”

Sounds solid to Jamie, and he makes a mental note to tell Loui to look for twine, or yarn. 

They get to the ground floor on the south end, past the body of the poor dog on the stairs. A quick look into the garage, making sure the gate still holds, and then down to the north end.

One of them is at the gate, silhouetted against the sunlight glinting off of the windshield of a truck. Bloody, Jamie sees, as he comes closer, even the color of her hair indistinguishable under the gore. It isn’t moving right… _she_ isn’t moving right, holding the bars of the gate in her hands but not reaching through, not trying to grab for him, even when he gets closer.

Another of the dead shuffles up behind her, and Jamie pops it in the head. His pole gets tangled in its brains and it is dragged forward as he tries to shake it off. It clunks into her back and falls, but she doesn’t flinch.

“Jamie,” she whispers, and he’s never felt the kind of dread and shame that washes over him.

“Kate? Oh shit. Shit. Get her in! Get that gate open!” 

Tyler grabs the handle and pulls it open and Jamie steps through and past, keeping Kate’s back safe as Nikki and Tyler pry her hands off of the bars and bring her inside. Shit. This is where Chet died, where Jamie ended him. She must have been outside this whole night, might have been staring at her dead husband the entire time Jamie was sleeping and eating and making plans. 

He puts his anger at himself into a swing against the next corpse to come shambling up at him, and the curtain rod he’s using as a spear folds alarmingly.

“Jamie, get the fuck back here!” Tyler snaps as Jamie makes to go after another one that’s further away. He doesn’t want to go back inside. Doesn’t think he deserves the safety of their building right now, but he’s never heard Tyler so scared and pissed at the same time so he goes.

The gate clangs shut and he watches as Nikki checks Kate over, looking at her arms and neck and shoulders, asks her if she’s bitten on her legs. She stares into nothing, unblinking, unflinching, and doesn’t answer. 

“The fuck did you survive?” Alfonse demands.

“I fell among the blighted leaves,” she whispers, and the hair on the back of Jamie’s neck prickles and rises. “I was covered, still and forgotten, and in the dark none came for me.”

“Holy fucking shit,” Tyler whispers. “Shit. Let’s get her upstairs.” 

They push and pull her to the stairs, past the body of her husband still folded sickeningly backwards over the rail. She doesn’t resist, but doesn’t help much either. It’s a long walk, and once they get to Jamie’s floor, Tyler just scoops her up and carries her like a bride, heedless of the blood and gore on her. Not nearly as aware of her mouth near his neck as Jamie would like, but he jogs ahead, gets the door open.

There’s nobody in the living room when they bust in, but Ofelia steps into the master bedroom doorway, frying pan in one hand, the biggest knife from Jamie’s kitchen in the other.

“Just us,” Jamie says, not knowing how much English she speaks. “Found a survivor. One of us.”

Tyler carries Kate into the bathroom and Nikki goes with him. Jamie, Tom and Alfonse stand around for a minute.

“You okay in there?” Jamie finally asks at the door.

“Yeah,” Nikki calls back. “She’s freezing. We’re going to be a while.”

Jamie nods, even though they can’t see him. “Okay. We’ll be working on this floor until you’re done.”

“Take the bat!” Tyler yells through the door. “Your pole is fucked.”

“Yeah,” Jamie says back, worried about weapons, worried about Tyler, worried about everything. 

He nods at the other two and they go out again. Their outside-team is getting precariously, dangerously small, and he doesn’t want to risk any of their lives by spreading them too thin, too far to get help. 

“We’ll stay up here until we have better numbers,” he says, even though the downstairs jobs are important, may come back to bite them on the ass. Not being thorough. Not being careful. What did he expect? Kate’s hollow eyes haunt him. “Alfonse, you start knocking on doors, and Tom and I will haul the bodies to the rail by the stairs. Try to keep in sight.”

Tom looks ill. “We’re just gonna throw them over? We can’t…bury them or something?”

Jamie shakes his head. “There’s no time. Not enough people. We need this quick, and we’re not going to get it done carrying that many loads down the stairs. We can’t be out there, for how long it would take digging graves.”

Tom nods, still unhappy. “We gotta eat this too,” Alfonse tells him, and Jamie isn’t sure what that’s all about, but Tom’s resolve hardens and he looks ready. 

The closest body is the lady in the Thanksgiving sweater, the big bright turkey on her chest spattered with blood, her milky eyes staring up. Except for the eyes, you wouldn’t know, that she’d been trying to eat them twelve hours ago, that she’d been a deadly threat. 

“Get the feet,” Jamie says, seriously reevaluating if he’ll be able to do this without losing his breakfast. Tom does, and they lift her, carry her down the hall, past Alfonse and to the rail. Jamie says a silent prayer for her, a silent hope for forgiveness for himself for what he’s doing, what he’s done. 

And then they tip her over the edge, watch her fall, soundless until she hits the sidewalk with a thump. Two of the dead turn at the noise, shamble over to investigate. 

Tom stares down, watching as the blighted bumble around. 

“We should have look,” Tom says. “In the pockets. Some of them here, maybe they live here, maybe they have keys.”

Jamie looks down. They are not going to take the risk to go outside to search her, but…

“Next one, for sure.”

============

Tyler isn’t sure what the hell he’s doing here, or how he ended up being the one in the bathroom with Nikki and Kate. He thinks maybe Nikki pushed it to come down that way. Somebody has to be in here helping her, Kate about as helpful as a giant doll. Probably should be either him or Jamie, as the ones least likely to take inappropriate interest in the situation. 

“Here, fold her elbow,” Nikki says, and he supports Kate’s weight against his chest while Nikki struggles her out of the high-tech winter-wear she’s in. Her hair stinks like wet pennies, darker, uglier smells under it. He’s definitely going to need a shower too, even if he’s only clean for two minutes before he goes out and gets gross again. 

Under her clothes, Kate is a lot less messy, pale skin chill under his fingers. Tyler wonders if that’s one of the symptoms of shock. Wishes he’d paid more attention in school. Or stayed in school. Or something. 

Nikki checks Kate over, rubs every smudge of blood with a damp hand to make sure it’s just surface mess and not a bite. 

“I’ll get in with her,” Tyler offers, kicks his shoes off and into a corner and steps in with his clothes on. The bathroom looks more like a damn butcher shop every time he comes through the door. 

“They were my friends,” Kate murmurs, shakes her head slowly back and forth. “My poor Chet.”

Ofelia knocks on the door behind Nikki and then opens it, lays a pile of clothing and towels on the toilet lid.

Nikki turns the faucet on, and the water pools by their feet, cold at first. When it’s warm, she pulls the lever to send it to the shower head. Tyler turns so his clothed back is the part of them that’s hit with that cold first burst.

Kate gasps as the spray hits, jerks in Tyler’s arms. 

“It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re safe.” He turns them around, leans her back and Nikki guides her head into the spray, tipped back so it won’t go in her eyes. 

“Where the hell are we going to put her?” Tyler asks, and Nikki shakes her head.

“I don’t know. Maybe next door. Kara could watch her—she’s got Dion and that tall dude with her if she needs backup.”

Tyler nods, moves his hands so Nikki can wash under them, trying not to touch Kate in her personal areas. She’s slippery with soap though, and he blushes as he gets a handful of side-boob.

“She lived here,” Tyler says. “Her and her husband, I would see them in the halls. They seemed nice. Smiled at Marshall when they saw her. Never looked down on me like I didn’t belong there.”

Nikki frowns. Gets a line of blood out of the crease of Kate’s neck.

“I thought you lived here. The way Jamie was when you were out there…”

Tyler shrugs. It seems like forever ago, life then seems unreal. “We. Hadn’t got that far. I was crashing here pretty regular, but.”

Nikki gets a towel and starts drying Kate off. Tyler’s clothes are sodden with water, colder than just being naked would be. He has to remind himself that the lights are still on, that it’s just the hot water running out, not turning off. 

“You got her?” Tyler asks Nikki as they get Kate out of the tub and onto her feet. 

“Yeah.” 

Tyler turns off the shower and stands shivering in the tub, sodden clothes clinging to his skin. 

“Here, Jesus, dry off,” Nikki says, tosses him a towel. She turns Kate so Kate’s back is to him.

He hangs the towel over his head while he slithers out of his wet jeans, then wraps it around his waist and drops the underwear out from under it. Tries to remember back before, to locker rooms and other times when nudity didn’t mean anything else. He pulls his shirt off, not sure that’s helping the not-warm-enough issue at all. 

Nikki passes him a t-shirt off of the pile. “Here. Sorry,” she says, and he’s not sure what he’s showing on his face, not sure what she’s seeing, but he takes it and puts it on, holds the towel at his hip while he steps out of the tub and finds a pair of sweat pants. 

Together, they get Kate dry and dressed, her hair wrapped up in a clean towel, two pairs of socks on her feet. 

“Ofelia, we’re taking her to Kara,” Tyler tells the woman when they see her in the kitchen on their way through. 

Ofelia waves them past, and Nikki and Tyler lead her on, through the room where they slept the night before, through the closet.

The apartment next door is empty, but there’s a turkey in the sink defrosting under a trickle of tap water. It’s a mirror of Jamie’s place, not nearly as trashed but clearly tossed, the couch cushions gone and the cabinets hanging open. 

They go through to the next, and people are there, Kara and Dion at the stove, Eduardo at the island, a printer running, page after page spitting out of it.

“Hey!” Eduardo greets, eyes going right to Kate. “Who’s this?”

“Kate. She’s had a rough night. Nikki and I need to get back out with Jamie’s team. Can we leave her here with you guys?”

“I hear them,” Kate whispers, head tipping side to side like that helps. “Hear them…”

“Shit, yeah,” Eduardo says, hops up to lead her to the couch. “You guys thought of anything else we need to research?” 

Tyler shrugs, tries to come up with something. “Do we have a good local map yet? Maybe a mile in every direction? Stores, parks, restaurants, what’s where.”

Eduardo nods. “I’ve been working on it.”

Tyler shrugs again, looks to Nikki.

“I can’t think of anything,” she says, and then nods towards the door. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”

Tyler nods, looks around for something to use as a weapon so he doesn’t have to take the bat back from Jamie. A long shape on the top of a tastefully decorated shelf catches his attention. He tips his head, starts to grin.

“Hey, is that a sword?”


	15. Chapter 15

They’ve almost cleared the level when Nikki and Tyler come out. Jamie can’t resist the urge to look Tyler over, to make sure he’s okay still, that something both improbable and horrible hasn’t happened to him in the last hour. His hair is damp, and some kind of goofy sword-thing is tied around his waist.

“The hell is that?” Jamie asks, wiping the sweat off of his face. “And why is your hair wet?”

Tyler frowns. “Kate was a mess. We had to get her cleaned up.” 

“You should have dried off better,” Jamie says. Vaguely, he knows he’s saying the wrong things in the worst way. “You’re gonna catch a cold or something.”

“It’s fucking t-shirt weather,” Tyler protests, and yeah, Jamie took off his flannel overshirt about half an hour ago, hung it on a doorknob somewhere. November weather in Dallas is not a fierce beast.

The others are staring, nowhere to go, waiting on Jamie to lead them. He tries to gather the ragged edges of his thoughts together. 

“We’re clearing bodies,” he says. “We’re done on this floor. I thought we should secure the ground floor, the office doors and see if we can reinforce the garage, and then we might as well go up to the top floor and then work our way down, clearing bodies. We’ve been searching for keys, so we’ll have easier access to apartments and maybe some vehicles if we need them later. Alfonse was knocking on doors, but hasn’t found anyone yet. 322 has a dog that we need to get to today or tomorrow at the latest, or not bother. 340 is unlocked. I’ll have Loui start there when he’s gone as far between the firewalls as he can from our base.”

Tyler nods, still frowning. His mohawk is reduced to sodden pink strands that hang limp on his skull. He’s wearing someone else’s clothes, a concert t-shirt from a band Jamie has never seen. It irks him, for reasons he can’t explain. 

“So…down?” Nikki asks. 

Jamie nods, tired. “You need a real weapon,” he says to Tyler.

“I got a weapon,” Tyler says. 

“It’s too…no. Not good,” Jamie objects. 

“Fuck you,” Tyler says, and shoulders past on the way to the closest stair to the offices.

Jamie clenches his jaw, reasons that breaking his fist on the wall won’t help anything. Stupid fucking stubborn shit-head.

They go down, Tyler leading the way with his stupid fucking sword out (just as likely to stab one of them as kill one of the dead, what the hell is he thinking), through the mail room and into the public areas of the complex—gym and media room, billiard room. 

“Here, take a pool cue,” Jamie urges him. Good solid wood, nice heft, something Tyler is familiar with using. 

Tyler ignores him, gets to the end where the double doors to the actual office were probably locked the night before when the staff went home. Tyler jiggles the knob, frowns at the wood like it’s pissing him off as much as he’s pissing Jamie off. 

“There might be master keys inside,” Tyler says. “Tools we might need.”

“Leave it,” Jamie says. Something thumps at the other side of the door. The shadows of feet shuffle around underneath. “Definitely leave it. Shit.”

“Think we can get the pool table through here?” Tyler asks, and Jamie tries to estimate the strength of the five of them, the weight of the table.

“If we can, we can get it wedged in,” Alfonse puts in. “Get it turned and drop it in.” 

Jamie considers the angles, the way the hall bends and leaves a space just bigger than the table between the door and nearest wall. He nods, happy with the plan. 

The table takes all they have to move it, nearly crushing Tom’s toes, banging Nikki’s knuckles on the doorframe. The scarf Tyler is using to hold his stupid sword with comes untied and the damn thing falls off of his waist. 

They get the table moved though, lifting and turning it and letting it settle in, sweating and panting. No matter how much strength pushes in on the other side, the doors can’t be opened more than a few inches without someone on their side moving the table out again, and hopefully they won’t have that need. 

Jamie surveys their work, feels unsatisfied despite the fact that he can’t find anything wrong with it. The ground floor is worse than he remembers, and he’s not sure anybody is feeling eager to go up four flights of stairs again.

“Okay, we may as well start down here, cleaning up the place and looking for anybody else alive. Nikki, you might have an easier time getting people to open doors than the rest of us, so you do that while we start clearing the dead. Keep one of us in sight. Let us know if you find anything.” He turns to Tyler and Alfonse. “We need to pile them up at the gates, and then we’ll get someone upstairs to run some distracting noise so we can clear them all the way out, get Loui down to help us with that part. We don’t want to build a pile that’s going to trap us in here. Don’t forget to check for keys. I know it’s bad, but we need the doors open and the cars running if we can.”

Tyler nods with the rest, jaw tense. Jamie wants to send him away, send him somewhere safe, but if he can’t do that, then he’ll keep him as close as he can. He meets Tyler’s eyes, nods him to one branch of the corridor. Tyler shifts the sword on his hip and follows. 

Jamie looks over the work to be done, six of the dead there to be cleaned up. He goes to the closest and starts riffling through its pockets. After a second, he sees Tyler out of the corner of his eye, going to the next one and doing the same. Down the hall, they can hear Nikki tapping on doors, calling hellos to whoever might be inside.

“The fuck is your problem?” Tyler asks, just louder than a murmur, low and sullen. 

“My problem? What the hell. You’re the one being stupid and stubborn. What the hell.”

Tyler flips a corpse with a little more enthusiasm than looks absolutely necessary, kicks sideways at his sword when it gets tangled up between his shin and the body. The sight of it makes Jamie angry, even though he has to tuck the baseball bat under his arm while he searches his dead guy.

“Yeah, your problem. This is about as shitty as a day can be, but we’re still on the same damn team.”

Jamie takes a breath. Tries to get the burn in his chest under control.

“You can’t fucking. You have to be smart, and it pisses me off when you’re not. Don’t be such a shithead, Tyler.”

Tyler stops what he’s doing, stands up straight, squares his shoulders. 

“If this is about the stupid fucking sword…”

“It’s not about the sword!” Jamie snaps. His voice rises despite his efforts to keep this quiet, keep it between them. “You have to think for your fucking self because I can’t. I fucked up. I fuck up. I can’t…”

“I don’t need you to fucking think for me!” Tyler hisses. 

“I left her,” Jamie whimpers out. “She. She came to help me, when I needed to keep the gates open for you. She helped me, and I fucking. Fucking left her out there.”

His eyes burn, and he wipes them angrily on the shoulder of his shirt, shit. He can’t. Not here. Not now.

“Fuck that shit,” Tyler says. “This is not in your control. Nobody can fucking— _make_ this world do what they want it to. Fuck that. Nobody can control this shit. We just have to ride through it the best we can. Nobody thinks Kate being outside was your fault, and if they do, they’ll have to come through me to get to you. You can’t—”

“I should have,” Jamie gasps, “Should have…” It’s not fair that there’s no end to that sentence, nothing he can learn from this, no alternate path he can look for next time.

“Bullshit.” Tyler says, his voice hard-edged. His eyes are pink around the edges, the rest of his face so pale. “That is total bullshit. We fuck up. We do our best and keep fucking going. I…” he falters, hands shaking. 

“I fucked up too, Jamie,” he says. “You don’t _own_ fucking up. I. There were these kids, and I didn’t know what the dead guys were yet. I just let one walk up on us. Bit the little one. We ran, but he caught up to us later, and his brother, he just. Just went to him.” Tyler looks gutted, looks like the life is bleeding out of him from some invisible wound. “They died. They both died, Jamie, and that fucking…”

Jamie wants to reach for him, but Tyler is walled up in fear and anger, and he’s not sure he’ll be able to take it if Tyler flinches away from him. 

Tyler’s breath hitches. “I had a truck, and a gun, and I fucking gave them away. I fucking gave them to the first person who asked for the keys. I could have got here with four more people, people who could have made a difference.”

He takes two steps one direction, paces back two the opposite way. Like he wants to bolt but there’s nowhere to go. 

“That’s not your fault,” Jamie says. “Somebody steals from you, they’re the asshole.”

Tyler shakes his head, grits his teeth and bends down to grab the corpse at his feet by the hands, starts dragging it towards the gate. “They’re the thief, I’m the dumbass,” he says. “I’m the fucking. The ‘shithead.’”

“Tyler,” Jamie says, not knowing how to segue from a name to an apology, but he owes one. 

“Grab this guy’s fucking feet, he’s heavy as hell,” Tyler cuts in, and it’s cowardly, but Jamie takes the feet and shuts the hell up before he really says something he can’t back away from.

They work, silent except for “Grab that” or “Did you check this one for keys?” 

It takes them the better part of the morning to get the ground floor bodies piled up by the gates. There are a dozen or more in the garage alone. The ones outside the garage gate moan and push against Jamie’s truck, but the can’t get by. Alfonse does something more to the gate to keep it from opening, Tom and Jamie pushing the dead back so he can work without getting bit when he reaches his hands through the bars. 

Tyler runs upstairs with Nikki after the gate is secured. They come down with water bottles filled with orange juice for everybody, and a big black marker for Nikki to use when she knocks on doors. She makes up a code. Dash means she’s knocked but they don’t know anything else. A means animals, dogs or cats heard through the door. The check mark she only uses once, for unlocked doors. P will be people, she says, but she hasn’t written it yet. B for blighted, and that one goes on four different doors on the ground floor. Jamie isn’t sure if that’s because they’ve broken through the windows or French doors from the street, or if threats in four apartments out of every twenty is what they can expect the whole building to be like. 

They work until noon, and then Eduardo comes down, the pink hammer in hand and Marshall on a short leash beside him. “Kara says lunch is ready. Come up when you’re ready.” 

Jamie figures it’s as good a time as any, nods towards the stairs. Tyler isn’t talking still, but none of the outside team are too chatty at this point. Eduardo leads them up to Jamie’s apartment. There is stuff piled outside of doors on the fourth floor—a case of water bottles, a tool box, a futon mattress leaning against a wall. Stuff that the inside team saw and thought they’d need sooner rather than later, Jamie guesses. 

Loui joins them on the way to Jamie’s apartment, white with drywall dust, black spots over it where he’s spattered with blood and brains. He tells Jamie that he’s opened up almost as far as he can go from the second unlocked door, hit one apartment with nasties in it. Jamie gives him the grocery bag full of keys they’d found, eight sets on three dozen dead. Two have clickers that look like Jamie’s one to the garage, so there is reason to hope. 

The smell of food fills the apartment when they go in, burgers and fries. The outside team takes turns at the bathroom sinks, washing their hands, soaping the blood off of their faces, out from under their nails. They fill their plates at the island and then find a seat. The couch is put back together, and Jamie sits there. Tyler takes his plate and sits on the floor on the other side of the room, glances at Jamie sidelong as he eats. The little girl goes to him and tries to mess with Tyler’s hair. Tyler ducks his head so she can reach 

Mikaela comes out to join them, walking slow and careful, baby Elle in her arms. Loui jumps up from his spot and offers her the chair. She looks pale, fragile, and Jamie worries what will happen if she needs some kind of help, what will happen to Loui if they can’t get it for her. Ofelia brings her a plate. She takes a while, but she finishes at least a full size serving.

Kate stands at the kitchen sink, washing her hands over and over until Kara rinses her hands, turns off the water and brings her to the island to sit.

Jamie lets his people eat in peace. It feels homey, and familiar, like team parties back in Kelowna. There aren’t enough buns for the hamburgers, and Jamie’s second helping is on some kind of cinnamon bread. It’s pretty terrible.

“Her name is Akshaya,” Mikaela says, nodding to where the girl is eating off of Tyler’s plate. “She’s been my good helper.”

“Good girl,” Ofelia agrees. Tyler crosses his eyes, sticks out his tongue, and Akshaya laughs at him. 

Mikaela says something soft to Loui and he helps her stand, walks at her elbow back to the bedroom.

“How’s it been up here?” Jamie asks, checking in with Ofelia and Kara, Dion and Eduardo. 

“Good,” Kara says. “We cooked and packed two fridges and emptied out another’s worth of stuff that’s too bulky or not ideal to hold onto. We’re trying to make each one a day’s food for all of us, maybe a little more. We’ll eat good until the power goes out, maybe a week after that.” She smiles. “It’ll be pizza tonight, and all the popcorn you can eat. I’ll be refreezing a turkey tomorrow if the power holds.”

“We’ve been breaking walls and storing water,” Loui says nodding towards Darius. “All the tubs and sinks, buckets, garbage cans, all of it.”

“Mikaela,” Jamie says. “I know you were looking for things she needs…”

“Diapers, pads for her…” Eduardo glances pointedly at his lap as he says the second thing. Jamie isn’t sure how she can be on her period so soon after a baby, but he doesn’t feel brave enough to question it. “Ofelia is making them out of t-shirts for now, but after the power goes out that’ll stop being a sanitary option.”

“How does it look downstairs?” Kara asks. “Are they thinning out any?”

Jamie shakes his head. The steady trickle by the gates had looked almost exactly the same as it had when Tyler and Loui’s groups came in. Clots of the dead stumbling into each other as they shove their way between the obstacles on the street.

“We’ve got the ground floor halls nearly cleared,” Jamie says. “We need to borrow Loui for a while after lunch, and Eduardo if you don’t mind coming down. The more people we have, the safer it can be for everybody while we shove them out the door.”

Eduardo looks grim, but he nods. 

“We’ll need you guys to make a distraction if we get too many of them,” Tyler says. “Throwing stuff off the balconies. We’ll have to figure out which of the balconies we can get to are closest without dropping shit on our heads.”

“We’ll finish the cleanup, and put string or rope or something across all the doors and stairs so that we’ll know if there are any inside,” Jamie says. “And then tomorrow, we’ll all work on food and water, making the ground-floor apartments more secure. When the power goes out, we’ll start planning a run to the grocery store across the street, see if there’s anything useful left at all.”

“I think we should move all the food we can up into the apartments that connect to this one,” Tyler says, and that would give them a cushion, if things go seriously bad. If it becomes people they have to protect against instead of the blighted. “Anything that we’re storing water in that’s mobile should be close at hand too.” 

Jamie nods. “Okay. Anybody not know what they’re doing for the afternoon?” Nobody raises their hands. 

Jamie just hopes this plan doesn’t get blown to shit as fast as the morning’s plan had.


	16. Chapter 16

Tyler stands at the gate, takes a breath, draws his sword. It doesn’t make the dramatic metal-sliding sound like the movies have led him to expect, but that’s okay. He would bet it looks fucking awesome. He hopes Jamie is fucking jealous, hopes Jamie is sorry he was such a dick about it. 

The dead mill around outside, and he puts the tip of the sword between the bars, pushes it through one of their heads. It falls, Nikki shoving it back with a pool cue. There is a crash from down the sidewalk, a flatscreen TV hitting the pavement. The ones in front of Tyler turn, and Tyler opens the door and steps out, Nikki just a step behind him. 

Jamie and Eduardo carry a body out together, Jamie doing the heavy lifting and Eduardo making sure it doesn’t get tangled up. Loui and Alfonse get the next, Tom and Kara another. 

“Tyler,” Jamie says, low and warning, and Tyler turns toward the other end of the street. Three are coming, stumbling eagerly towards the sounds of life. He tightens his grip on the sword handle, steps in between the dead guys and his team-members. The first one reaches for him and he swings the sword like he would the bat. Feels it chunk into the thing’s arm. Feels it bite in and stick.

“Shit,” Tyler hisses, wrenches back on the sword to get it out of the cut in the bone. It doesn’t have the heft of the bat, doesn’t knock their hands away, turn them to the side, shatter their limbs. The blighted keeps on walking towards him, and he stabs, a little desperately. The fine-point tip of the sword misses the eye socket and it just doesn’t have the weight to punch through just anywhere. It turns, skims off the front of its skull, leaving a deep groove in its skin but not slowing it down.

“Shit shit!” Tyler says again, sees Nikki dealing with a dead of her own out of the corner of his eye. He’s supposed to take care of this shit, let the rest move the bodies. 

He swings, a wild chop to the head as the dead gets inside of his range, as it’s almost on top of him. The sword bites deep, and the dead falters and falls. There is a sharp _ping!_ sound as the sword twists in Tyler’s grip, not loud but very clear. The middle third of the blade spins in the air, bright and sharp and Tyler flinches back so it doesn’t hit him in the fucking face.

“God damn it,” Jamie growls behind him, and the baseball bat comes down on the next-closest dead as Tyler retreats back, brutal and efficient, driving it down into the ground with the force of Jamie’s swing. “Go help Eduardo,” Jamie says, and Tyler backs away, heart pounding. Tosses the useless handle of the sword and grabs the wrists of the dead that Eduardo is trying to drag by himself, pulls it over to the pile. 

The shopping cart they’d brought Dion in on is sitting right there, at the same time something that’s in the way and also a useful thing that they actually need, so he grabs it on the way back in, hauls it over the curb and pulls it through the gate, shoves it so it rolls haphazardly down the hall. 

Tom is out with Jamie and Nikki, while Tyler gets another corpse, and Tom steps out to help them thin the numbers when a waves comes in all at once. It’s over before Tyler could have gotten there, before he could grab a weapon from someone else and fight, but he can’t shake the feeling it should have been him at Jamie’s back. 

They work, move all the bodies from the north gate out and then bring their people back in. Close the gate securely behind them. Tyler feels sick, leans his ass against the brick wall of the corridor and puts his head down. He waits, for Jamie to yell at him. Thinks maybe he deserves it. He just. Thought he could do more if he had a cool weapon. Thought it would work better than it had. 

“Hey.” Jamie’s voice is softer than Tyler expected. “Hey, are you okay?”

Tyler nods, tries to speak but has to clear his throat before any sound will come out. “Yeah.”

“Don’t do that to me again,” Jamie says, still soft, pleading. “Please, Tyler.”

Tyler nods and wants Jamie’s arms around him, Jamie’s hands on him. He swallows hard and pushes up from the wall. The job is only half-done. 

“We ready to get the other side?” he asks. Jamie calls up to Tom’s phone and tells Dion that they’re moving sides and to switch windows. It’ll take upstairs longer to move than downstairs, so they have time to catch their breath, time to stretch and rest. 

The second gate is easier than the first, not quite so many dead to drag out, not quite so many walking dead to put down. 

Jamie hesitates in the gate on the way back in, looks down the mostly-empty street. 

“I’m going to go around,” he says. “Someone stay here, in case I need to come back, and someone go to the other gate to let me in.”

Tyler’s stomach drops. “What?”

Jamie stares at the outside, the gate still not quite closed. 

“We need to know what’s going on in the apartments with blighted in them. If they were there before they changed, or if there’s a gaping hole to the outside that they’re coming in through. We need to know if we can clear them or if we’re taking on more than we can do.”

Tyler can see that. It needs to be done, and they’ve reduced the number of deads on the street already. Probably the best time for it. 

“Okay. Office side or garage gate side?”

Jamie looks back over his shoulder, winces. “No sense in risking both of us,” he says, like that kind of logic is helping.

“Safer together,” Tyler counters, remembering Jamie stepping away from the gate when they brought Kate in, the sheer terror he’d felt. “I’m coming with you.”

Jamie glances over Tyler’s shoulder, and he figures Loui or Tom is behind him. “You really gonna pull your boys into this?” Tyler asks, chest tight and shoulders tense. Wonders if they’ll grab him to keep him from going after Jamie. Wonders if he has it in him to bash their kneecaps in if they try. If Jamie goes out, Tyler’s going out.

“I’ll go to the other gate,” Tom says, and Loui snorts, follows him back down the hall. 

“We’ll watch for you, clear the road pretty good for you,” Loui calls back to them.

“Fucking traitors,” Jamie mumbles. 

“I’ve been out there,” Tyler says. “I know what we’re up against. I know how to move around them.”

Jamie takes one last breath, face turned down, miserable. “You’ve been out there,” he says. “If it looks like a bad idea, if we need to go back here instead of going forward, you call it.”

It’s the shittiest victory ever, and Tyler looks out at the dead dude shuffling towards them with a dull sick feeling in his guts. 

“We go out and keep moving fast. We see what we can see on the run and we get to that second gate. If one of them gets between us and the gate, we get past it. If that means putting it down, do it moving. Don’t square up. Don’t stop.”

Jamie nods like he’s taking Tyler’s words seriously. 

“Stay here until we come back either way,” Tyler tells Nikki and the rest. “We might have to turn around at the last minute, so don’t leave us stuck out there.”

Nikki rolls her eyes at him, but hey, it doesn’t hurt to have good communication. She passes him the pool cue, the wood warm from her hands, a little slick but very familiar in heft.

Tyler takes three quick breaths and nods. Nikki pulls the gate the rest of the way open and he and Jamie burst out, slipping past the dead outside the gate, charging past a wrecked car. Jamie looks up at the outside of the building, but Tyler is paying more attention to the blighted. Sees a gap closing before Jamie does.

“Up,” Tyler calls. “Over the blue car.” He steps up onto the hood, hand back reaching for Jamie’s to pull him up. They go over the roof and down the trunk before the dead that were cornering them can react, slow-turning and getting tangled up on each other. 

“There,” Jamie says, pointing as they jog, at a broken French door glass. The ‘ground’ floor isn’t flush with the sidewalk—the bottom of the doors are about four feet above the street level, buffered by holly bushes in front and guarded by flat railings that go higher than Tyler could reach. As they watch, one of the dead stumbles to the broken glass and falls out over the rail. Hits with a crunch and starts crawling after them. Graceless and fucking dumb, they sure as hell didn’t climb up there after they died. Must have been inside when the sickness took them over. 

Tyler nudges Jamie’s path around a cluster of threats and they turn the corner around the edge of the building. He slows down for a few steps, checking out the grocery store. It looks pretty much like it did last time he was there, the parking lot cluttered with haphazardly parked cars and stray shopping carts. The propane tanks are all gone, and the pile of firewood that was on display out front. There are still bales of straw and decorative gourds, and if they can get in, he hopes there will be more edible things inside. He doesn’t see anybody alive, but they’re too far away to tell. It’s not secure, not easy to lock up, not full of layers of doors like the apartments are, so he doubts anybody has decided to squat there.

On his other side, the broad glass wall of the apartment complex’s office shine in the sunlight, looking untouched by the destruction. Tyler tries to take a mental snapshot to deal with later. One of the dead, inside, walks face-first into the glass, then slides sideways to follow them, smearing blood as it goes.

“Almost there,” Tyler says, breathing good, breathing steady. Not running so fast that he runs out of air. They turn the last corner, and a broken line of blighted spans the street, some closer, some further out, gaps between them. He can see the door. 

“There, where they’re thin,” he says, and he and Jamie hit that spot together, smacking away clawed fingers, breaking arms, smashing skulls. One of them falls down, still moving, hand wrapping Tyler’s ankle as he jumps past. 

“Fuck!” he grunts out as he falls, hits the ground hard, knuckles scraping the cement where he’s gripping the weapon instead of cushioning his landing. 

Jamie skids to a stop, turns and comes back. He’s a big dude, and the dead guy’s head crushes like a watermelon when he stomps it with his full weight. 

“Up!” Jamie pants, grabbing the back of Tyler’s shirt and hauling him to his feet. The hot bite of fabric-burn flares at his neck and armpits. They’re close. Really close now. The door is right there. And past it, just three of the dead between the door and the next corner of the building. 

“All the way?” Tyler asks. They’re already out, his heart pounding. Feels so fucking alive and free. Isn’t ready to go back inside, isn’t ready for the duty and work. “Should we get a look at the outside of the garage?”

Jamie slows a little, looks through the gate at Tom and Loui. “Wait,” he tells them, and picks up speed again, bashing down two of the dead as he goes. Tyler grins, wild, puts the pool cue through the head of the third one. 

The garage side road is more congested than the other three sides, a busier road on a normal day, heavily used when people started trying to evacuate. A UPS truck is diagonal across the road, cars packed up against the side of it. Tyler follows Jamie around the back bumper of the truck. They take one look and start back-pedaling.

“Back back back back,” Tyler chants, turning and running. A garbage bag caught on the rooftop antenna of a police car has caught the attention of at least a hundred of those things, a hundred of them just standing around, waiting for something they can eat. 

Jamie’s hand is warm and heavy on the middle of his back, urging him on, back towards the gate.

Tom and Loui pull the gate open as they get to it. Tyler looks over his shoulder and the wave of dead is following them. 

“Shit!” 

“Up! Up!” Jamie orders. “Out of sight! That many at the gate…” and they all know what that’ll mean. It can’t hold, not that much weight, that many dead pushing at it.

They slam the gate and run up the stairs, back far enough down the corridor that the floor hides them from the dead. Jamie pulls out his phone, calls upstairs. “We need a distraction!” he calls. “Get them off of the south gate! There’s too many of them!”

The gate clangs and rattles beneath them. Loui takes off to the other gate. If this one falls, they need to be in the apartment. If the other group gets cut off, it’ll be the garage massacre all over again. 

Something white flies through the air from above them, hits the ground with a sharp smash. They get to the fourth floor, and Darius and Ofelia are there, holding stacks of plates perched on the rail, flinging them like Frisbees out over the street. 

“Here, gimme some,” Tyler says, takes half a stack under his arm and sails a plate out into the street. It hits a parked car, and some of the dead turn towards it. Good, but not what he was looking for. 

“Find the car alarm,” Tyler says as Jamie starts throwing, picks another car that looks like maybe it was parked with care instead of crammed into the mess. The next plate misses all the cars completely, but takes the top-half of one of the blighted. The third plate spiderwebs a windshield, but doesn’t do more than that. 

Jamie’s throw has better luck, and the sharp “BooooWeep! BooooWeep! Honk! Honk! Honk!” Of the alarm starts, drawing all of the dead. From the edges of the block, more are coming, clustering around, packing the street. Tyler and Jamie step back, stack their ammunition where it’ll be close at hand the next time they need it. They step back, knowing the blighted won’t look for them with this loud noise to draw them, but it feels better, safer, to be out of their line of sight.

“Shit!” Tyler breathes. Realizes Jamie’s hand is on his waist, strong and broad. He lets himself lean into it. Lean back against Jamie’s chest. He shouldn’t be grinning. Not when they almost died, but he is. 

“Yeah,” Jamie huffs. “That was so fucking dumb.” He doesn’t sound pissed about it though, and Tyler figures the car alarm idea made up for the stupidity of trying to go all the way around. Jamie leans his forehead against the back of Tyler’s neck, breathes out a relieved laugh. His hand slides around and up and presses against the pounding of Tyler’s heart.

Tyler is hit with the sudden urge to fuck, to push Jamie’s hand down to his dick, to turn around and put his tongue down Jamie’s throat. To get so close to him that none of this matters. Not the death and the dead, not the fighting and running, not the cold hungry days ahead that he can’t see any way to avoid.

He can feel Jamie’s belt buckle against his back. He wants to rub back against him. Wants to know that Jamie is his, that Jamie wants him.

The other half of their team comes running down the hall, eyes wide and out of breath. 

“The gate! Are they through the gate?” Nikki pants as she gets to them. 

“No. No, doesn’t look like it.” Tyler hands her back her weapon.

Jamie pushes Tyler up and he stands, unsteady on worn-out legs. “I think we’re good for now. We’ll have to go down later and make sure there’s no damage, but I don’t want to mess with them now when they’re agitated.”

They stumble back down the hall and into Jamie’s apartment, past Dion hanging on the doorframe, holding the door open for them until Eduardo comes back. Tyler sinks to the floor against the nearest wall, lets Marshall climb all over him. 

The baby is crying, faint through the closed door between bedroom and living room. 

“The fuck was that about?” Dion asks, and Tyler shrugs. 

“We needed to know what was going on outside. And it’s not-good. Not terrible, if we can keep them on the gate side, but not great.”

“You went _outside_?” Dion asks, looking at Eduardo like he expects Tyler let his boy get damaged. Eduardo goes to him, calls him a grandmother and a worry-wart. Lets Dion touch him, see for himself that Eduardo is fine. 

Jamie looks around. “Where’s Kate?” he asks.

Everybody looks at each other for a second, and then Loui’s eyes go to the master bedroom. He crosses to the closed door in three steps, Jamie right behind him. Tyler dumps Marshall off of his lap and rushes after them. 

He has a split-second snapshot of the room between Loui and Jamie as the door is flung open. Sees Mikaela sitting against the headboard of the bed, baby in her arms, Kate kneeling on the mattress next to them. 

“Loui!” Mikaela calls out, and Kate turns, eyes wide and teeth bared. 

“Don’t touch them! Don’t touch them! You can’t have them!” She has a piece of wood in her hands, like a fucking rectangle of lumber, and she swings on Loui. The board’s edge catches him on the forearm when he raises it to block and glances off of his head. 

Jamie rushes in when she over-commits to the swing, grabs her from behind, wraps her up in his long arms. He puts the side of his face against her ear, out of danger of getting a head-butt. Pins her elbows to her sides, gets one wrist and then the other tight against her chest. The wood, the front of one of the nightstand drawers, falls out of her hand.

She throws herself up and back, quiet now except for soft animal whines and grunts. Knocks Jamie back a few steps but he doesn’t overbalance. Jamie lets her kick and fight, keeps a hold of her, keeps her from hurting anybody, including herself. His body is huge behind hers, strong enough to keep his feet even though she’s putting her entire strength into knocking him around.

Loui stumbles to the bed, to his wife. His head is bleeding, his face red with it. The baby wails. 

Tyler fights the urge to run, to leave. Fights to not scream at Jamie to stop, stop touching her. It’s nothing like the shelter, when Davey tried to end himself in the shower, and somehow it’s exactly like that, maybe like the ugly weeks leading up to that day packed into one moment. Tyler’s stomach tries to turn itself inside out, his heart pounding so hard he’s dizzy with it.

Kate finally goes down, drops forward to her knees and Jamie goes with her, keeps her wrapped tight. “Stop, stop, please. Please,” Jamie begs, tears on his face. 

Nikki pushes past Tyler and he steps back, lets Eduardo drag him further away, back to Dion.

“They got it,” Dion murmurs, low and strong, hand on Tyler’s arm like he’ll hold him there if he tries to go back in. “You don’t gotta get in that. They got it.” 

Nikki and Jamie come out with Kate, take her straight to the bathroom. There’s blood on her mouth, but Tyler doesn’t think she bit anybody but herself. Jamie is a mess, his hair wrecked, his eyes wet. He glances at Tyler, like he’s double-checking where he is, but then they’re closing the bathroom door and Tyler can’t see him anymore. 

Tyler turns away, needs something. Needs to. Do. 

“Hey,” he asks Alfonse, who is standing there like he has no idea what to do about any of this shit either, “Want some coffee?”

——————


	17. Chapter 17

The apartment smells like coffee when Jamie comes out of the bathroom. Nikki has Kate, and Kara went in to help. Kate, well, passive is the best word he can think for it. Dazed and dull-eyed. He doesn’t think it’s because he hurt her. He’s not sure though, that he wasn’t holding her arms too tight. She’d bit her lip, and the blood was startling, even as much of it as he’s seen in the past days.

Tyler pours him a cup of coffee, and he has a pang of dread. There won’t always be coffee. It’s a finite resource. It’ll be gone and no way to get any more, like so many other things. No new coffee for years, maybe, best case scenario. 

“Thanks,” he says, his voice rough. Tyler nods, isn’t meeting his eyes. The coffee is sweet and pale, not so hot that he can’t drink it down in a few sips.

“I thought. We’d take ten, get some coffee in us, go back down again. Still a lot to do.”

Jamie nods. He’d like nothing better than to call it a day, even though the clock on the microwave says two o’clock. 

“How’s…” Tyler nods towards the open bedroom door.

Jamie shrugs. “I need to go ask.” He thinks he saw Ofelia in there with the couple. Everyone else is still sitting around, looking awkward.

“Here,” Tyler says, and splits what’s left of the coffee between three more cups. Stirs in generous scoops of sugar, tops it with half an inch of milk. Jamie finishes off his mug and gathers the new trio. 

He goes to the bedroom, knocks on the door-frame. Ofelia looks up from where she’s doctoring Loui’s head. There’s blood down his neck, staining the collar of his shirt. Mikaela is sitting up, her back against the headboard of the bed, the baby nursing quietly at her breast. Akshaya’s eyes peek up at him from the far side of the bed. He thinks she was probably under it while he held Kate. May have seen it all.

“She never hurt us,” Mikaela says to Jamie, urgent and worried. “Kate. She was try to quiet the baby. So scared.”

Jamie presses his lips together, nods. “And you’re okay? Both of you?”

Mikaela nods. 

“This isn’t okay,” Loui says. “I know she was scared, but she can’t be in here like that. She could have…” he stops that thought before he says it, before he worries Mikaela or makes himself crazy with the could-have-beens. 

Ofelia tsks at him, presses the folded up wash-cloth harder on his head where his hair is parted around the cut. Loui hisses, winces but doesn’t pull away. 

“We’ll figure it out,” Jamie says. “We’ll make sure there’s a locked door between Kate and Mikaela next time.” 

Ofelia says something Jamie doesn’t understand, but her ‘get over here’ gesture is pretty clear. She takes one of his hands and holds it over the cloth, pushes until Loui hisses again. With Jamie keeping pressure on, she uncaps a tube of super-glue, squeezes it until there’s a bead of clear glue glistening at the top. 

Jamie pulls back when she tells him to, and she’s quick with the glue. 

“How’s it feel?” Jamie asks.

“Hurts,” Loui answers, and Jamie groans with frustration.

“I mean does it feel like a concussion? Can you play or do I bench you?”

Loui’s lips quirk. “I’m good coach. Put me in.” 

“I need you up here. You and Nikki help Kara pack some more freezers. Keep Kate with you guys. Be here if your family needs you.”

Loui nods, grateful for the out. 

==========

 

Alfonse wedges the claw of one hammer into the thin gap between door and frame. “Watch your eyes,” he warns, and then swings the other hammer, hitting them face to face, driving it in there. The metal of the door distorts by the knob, the reflection of the hall light curving. He hits it three more times, a sharp steel-on-steel sound that leaves Jamie’s ears ringing. The dog inside is losing it’s mind, barking and snarling

He holds out a hand and Jamie passes the thickest of the screwdrivers over. He hammers that in, and Jamie takes hold of the hammer that’s still wedged in. They pry in opposite directions, forcing every millimeter of flex the door has. Tyler pulls the knob sideways, hits the door with his shoulder and it pops open.

The barks quiet to terrified whines, the odor of piss and shit overwhelming the smells of death in the corridor (or maybe Jamie’s nose is just used to the smell of death after the day he’s had so far). He half expects the dog to rush out and bite them, but it cowers back.

“Hey baby,” Tyler says, soft and sweet, holds out the bowl of Marshall’s food they brought with them. “Hey, look what I have.” He sets it on the floor, reaches and unlocks the door from the apartment-side and closes it again. The latch is intact enough that it catches, but won’t be very effective at keeping anybody out. 

“We’ll bring him some water in a minute,” he says, listening through the maimed crack in the door as the dog gulps down the chow. They head for the next apartment marked with an A. 

————————

Tyler looks around the ground-floor apartment. Besides the destruction the lonely starving dog did, it looks untouched, like the owners might be back any minute. Outside, the sun is down, the streetlights on, Dallas unnaturally quiet and still. Tom and Alfonse are still with them, but Jamie is thinking he’ll send Alfonse up soon. The man isn’t complaining, but his limp is getting worse. The way he props himself up whenever they aren’t moving, the tight lines on his face, it looks like his leg is hurting like hell. Nikki and Loui won’t be coming down again this night. 

Jamie stands behind Tyler. Tries to see what he’s seeing. He has that calculating look in his eyes, like he did back in the truck in the garage. 

“The dead can’t get up the balconies to get in,” Tyler says. “People though, they can get up there if they go over the holly bushes. Maybe throw a car mat or a rug or something over it.” 

He’s thinking like a thief, Jamie thinks. Probably a good thing at least one of them can. 

“So we have to make those glass doors look like more work than they’re worth. Like the dead will be on them before they can get through. There’s no leverage from out there. Holding on the rail, breaking the glass, that’s light work. If we move the fridge over in front of it, it would take a hell of a lot more effort to get through.”

“We’re blocking out the people?” Tom asks, unsure. Like he can’t quite get his mind around it. 

“If they’re coming in the windows, getting in without us knowing... People that could be sick, people that could be dangerous. I don’t like locking them out, but that…”

“Ain’t safe,” Alfonse finishes. 

“If we meet people in the daylight, we can decide who’s a risk, who we can bring in,” Tyler says. “Leaving holes like this, somebody’s gonna come take this place away. Bad guys are just as likely to still be breathing as good. More maybe.”

Jamie thinks of the enormity of this job. There are fewer apartments on the ground floor than the others because of the office and other public spaces, but still. There are at least twenty, and they’ll have to clear the ones with blighted in them, move twenty refrigerators. They’ll need to move what food Kara will want to freeze. Need to search for tools or weapons or medical supplies. The important stuff. 

“Tom, you and Tyler go get that shopping cart out of the hall, and we’ll start loading it up. Alfonse, you get the fridge disconnected, while I look around for other stuff we need.”

They split up, Tyler carrying the baseball bat, Tom at his shoulder. Their numbers are getting spread thin and thinner, and Jamie doesn’t like it at all.

=============

Tyler’s legs are jelly by the time they push the loaded cart up the parking garage ramp. They’d gone from the apartment that had the dog in it, through two walls and gotten two more apartments blocked, but there’s so much more left to do.

Jamie’s shoulder is against his as they push the cart up, Tom pulling, Alfonse doing good just to keep himself moving. Maybe loading it so high with stuff wasn’t the best idea. The ramp had seemed a lot kinder the last time he’d been up it.

They get to Jamie’s door, and Eduardo opens it when Tom taps on it.

The inside smells like pizza and Kara smiles, thin and brittle, but at least she’s trying. “I was just about to send someone down to get you guys. The second batch of pizzas are almost ready if you want to get cleaned up.”

Tom nods and heads for the bathroom. Alfonse groans and doesn’t look like he’s moving anytime soon. Tyler stands where he is for a second, trying to figure out if he can wash up in the kitchen sink, or if it’s better to go risk bugging Mikaela. 

“Come on,” Jamie says, and tugs his sleeve. He follows Jamie through the bedroom and through the closet, into someone else’s home to use their bathroom. Someone who isn’t coming home, someone who might be shuffling around the base of the building right now, someone whose brains Tyler might have smashed a baseball bat through.

Jamie puts him in front of a sink and he starts the water running out of habit, takes the wash cloth when Jamie hands it to him. It comes away from his skin pink, and he swallows hard, strips his shirt off so he can get at the line between neck and chest. He untapes his hands, looks down at the sore pinkness of them. There’s peroxide in one of the drawers, and he pours a generous stream over both palms. After he’s done, he rifles through the drawers until he finds a 5-pack of tooth brushes with three still in their slots. He pours peroxide over two of them, just in case, and lays one out for Jamie. 

Jamie messes around in the closet—Tyler can hear coat hangers rattling on the rod. 

“Here,” Jamie says when he comes out, and lays a t-shirt beside him. Dead guy’s clothes. Something Tyler’s going to have to get used to. The inside crew has better things to be doing than keeping them in clean laundry, and the power and water isn’t going to last forever, anyway. He wonders how many days they can go, just wearing other people’s stuff. 

Tyler pulls the shirt on, watches as Jamie cleans himself up, listens to his own stomach growl.

“We did good today,” Tyler says, the words coming out of his mouth without much planning.

Jamie pauses and meets his eyes in the mirror. Nods slowly. 

“Nobody died,” he says. It’s a horrible way to gauge their days by. 

Tyler swallows, and Jamie draws him in, pulls him against his shoulder and holds him. He closes his eyes, just for a minute, just to rest. 

He can _feel_ Jamie thinking, planning, probably laying out the next day’s work for them. 

“Stop,” Tyler groans, and Jamie huffs. “Food. Bed. We’ll fuck with everything else in the morning.”

Jamie nuzzles his temple, and lets them step back. 

“Yeah. Okay.”

They go back through the wall and join the rest of the group in the living room. There are four pizzas on the island. Apparently Kara is fully embracing having a long line of interconnected kitchens. It looks like she’s added extras that won’t last from the fridges she’s run into too. One has piles of chopped-up lunch meats over the flimsy pepperoni it came with, another is buried in broccoli and fresh sliced tomato. 

They eat pizza and popcorn, Jamie at his spot on the couch, Tyler sitting on the floor, leaning against his shins. 

“Hey.” Jamie nudges his shoulder and Tyler blinks up.

“Eat,” Jamie tells him. “You fell asleep between bites.”

Tyler looks down at the pizza in his hand, makes himself eat another bite. Tiredness and hunger are each vying for supremacy. He chews and closes his eyes, rests his head on Jamie’s knee. 

Jamie leans forward, finger-combs his mohawk, scritches his short nails over Tyler’s scalp.

“Where we sleeping tonight?” Tyler asks. 

Jamie hesitates, and Tyler figures he’s looking at everyone else to get their input. 

“One more night like we were last night, I think. We’ll put Kate in our room.” Away from Mikaela, he means. “I don’t want us getting too spread out, and I want an extra closed door between our people and the outside, but a little more space would make it easier to sleep. I thought tomorrow we could bust through the actual wall of the guest bedroom, into the bedroom of the apartment next door. Put a few people in there, let Loui back in with his wife.”

Someone makes a grunt of agreement, but Tyler isn’t sure who. He gets another slice of pizza into his stomach, and then can’t find the energy to get another one. 

“Come on,” Jamie says, and gives Tyler enough of a nudge to get him moving. They go and brush their teeth again, and crawl into the room-sized pallet in the guest room, Kate against the wall by Nikki, Tom and Loui and Alfonse settling down in their spots. 

Somebody turns out the light, and Tyler closes his eyes.

Jamie’s hand finds his stomach in the dark, soft noises on the bedding as he shifts around. Nuzzles in under Tyler’s jaw. 

Tyler is too tired to get it up, but that’s not even what Jamie is after. He holds Tyler close, his arms warm and strong around him. Tyler is asleep before Jamie is.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (now might be a good time to look down at the end notes if you like warnings more than you hate spoilers...)

Breakfast on Day 3 of the end of the world is leftover pizza, chewy and thick with the added toppings.

Jamie calls his brother, and Tyler texts everybody he knows in Dallas. He stares for a long time, at the numbers for his mom and dad. Wonders again if things are so fucked up everywhere, if they’re okay and wondering about him, or chin-deep in their own world of shit.

“I don’t think the plane made it,” Tom confides to Tyler, breaking his train of thought. “I sent some text, to everybody who isn’t here. Nobody text back.”

Tyler nods, chews on his lip. Maybe. Maybe him being around didn’t fuck it up for Jamie after all. Maybe Jamie’s doing better here than he would have done on the plane. 

Still, it feels like a dick move to be relieved all of Tom’s local friends are dead. 

“Shit,” he breathes, and Tom nods. 

Tyler looks to the closed bedroom door, listens to Jamie’s voice rise and fall as he comes closer and then walks away again. 

He looks down at the phone in his hands, scrolls past his parent’s numbers to the people who matter more to him. He wants. To call them. To let them know he’s still alive, to find out if they’re okay. To try to talk them into letting him come get them. 

He’s just not strong enough, not right now. He closes his phone, stuffs it in his pocket. 

“Ready to get going?” Jamie asks as he joins them. His face is tight and worried, but he’s keeping it together and Tyler can’t expect any less from himself.

“Yeah. Let’s get on it.”

==============

Tyler adjusts his grip on the baseball bat, checks that Nikki is ready beside him with her sharpened pool cue. Loui and Tom behind them just in case. He nods, and Jamie and Alfonse haul in different directions on their pry-tools. Jamie lays his shoulder into the door, pushes with all the strength of an NHL player’s legs.

The dead on the other side moan, thump on the door, push from their side to try to get at the tasty humans on the other side. 

The door cracks open and Alfonse gets the head of his hammer in to keep the latch from closing again. 

A hand reaches for his arm, skin hanging from fingers mauled by trying to dig through the door. Tyler smashes it before it can get a hold of Alfonse, but Alfonse loses his grip on the hammer, and something on the other side takes it away. 

“Fuck,” Jamie swears as he’s shoved back, as the door closes again, the dead on the other side scratching and clawing at it, moaning and agitated. “How many of these assholes are in there?”

“It’s no good,” Loui says. “Going through the doors. There’s too many. Even if we got it open, we don’t want to fight that.”

“We can’t just _leave_ them behind us though,” Jamie protests. “We can’t have this hanging out in our basement.”

Tyler isn’t sure whose logic he wants to win out. 

Loui shrugs. “We go next door, knock some holes in the wall, play whack-a-mole when they poke their heads through. Is how I did the ones I found upstairs.”

Jamie sighs, aggravated, nods. 

“Hey,” Tyler says as they step back. “I don’t like the looks of the latch.” It’s impossible to tell, if it’s just the weight pushing on the other side that’s keeping it closed, or if the latch is holding on its own.

“I’ll stay here and keep them pushing on the door until you guys get in there. Make sure you don’t get jumped from behind.” He taps the door with his bat, listens to the thumps and bumps from inside. 

Jamie gives him a look, like he’s trying to decide if Tyler is being a dumbass again. He must like what he finds, because he nods and turns to help the next break in.

=================

Loui stays with them until the apartments with blighted in them are cleared. They throw the bodies out of the French doors, over the balcony railings to rot in the bushes. A stab of wrongness hits Tyler, not with every one, but sometimes. When the dead is a kid or a girl, or an old person. People lost that nobody will be left to mourn. 

They find two more dogs still alive. Five cats that they just let loose to help with the rats when that problem gets bad. Tyler leaves their dry food in cut-open bags or opened containers, hoping it’ll last them a while. Resolves to make sure he puts out water a couple of times a week. The canned food he puts by to take upstairs. It would be the first time things have gotten so bad for him that he’d eat it, but he knows kids who had. Knew. 

One of the infected apartments had fifteen people in it, smooth dark hair, tan skin. The women wore long colorful dress-things with gold along the edges. Elephant idols on their shelves and labels on their food that Tyler can’t read. People new to town maybe, nowhere to evacuate to. The guy who’d been carrying Akshaya might have been heading here. Might have joined them all loaded up in one place they thought was safe. Someone there must have been sick, must have brought it in and Tyler doesn’t know how Jamie’s group got so fucking lucky. He feels sick, thinking about whoever it was that died in the bathroom, how close it was, how many they could have lost.

================

Jamie and Tom are manhandling a fridge into place in front of an apartment’s outer doors when Darius runs into the room, wide-eyed and breathless. 

“Kate!” Darius gasps. “She’s gone. She was. We were. Just. Looked up and she wasn’t there anymore.”

Jamie’s gut clenches around the news. “Tyler!” He yells, and Tyler and Nikki come out of the bedrooms, meet in the middle where he is. “Kate’s gone. Tom, north gate, Alfonse, south. Nikki, make sure she’s not heading to the garage. Me and Tyler and Darius will go through until we find her.” It bites at him, that they’re losing time to this, precious hours of electricity. 

They run, criss-crossing the corridors, trying to cover all the branches, all the turns. “Loui, does he know?” Jamie asks as they search. 

“Kara was lookin’ for him. Made sure Mikaela and the baby were locked up safe first.”

They search, calling when they get to the stairs for the person down below to move up a level. She has to be here, has to be above them (unless she’s found an unlocked door they missed somehow, unless she’s gotten behind them, unless she’s heading for a gate, unless the dead are flooding in right this second). He tries not to think about the roof of the garage, the fifth floor balconies. 

They hit the level that Jamie’s apartment is on, split up to get all the angles. Jamie turns a corner and Loui is there, on his knees in the corridor, hammer in one hand, the other braced against the floor. 

“Loui!” Jamie calls out, rushes to him and crouches beside him. “What—”

Loui shakes his head, eyes closed, tears on his face. “She just had to wait. We were here. We were close. Why. Why she didn’t wait?” 

Jamie looks up at the open door behind him. “Kate?” 

Loui shakes his head. “No. A little mamma. She. She didn’t wait for us. The poor babe. Poor little one.”

Jamie swallows hard, makes himself stand on shaky legs. Something moves beyond the door. A voice hums softly. Kate steps out of the apartment, a small bundle in her arms, wrapped all over in a towel. She walks around Jamie like he’s a pillar, something to avoid but deserving no attention. She sways softly, carries the bundle, the baby, down the corridor to the stairs.

Nikki stands on the landing, shocked and confused. 

“Let her by,” Jamie says. He would rather let Kate play this out than deal with what’s in her arms himself. Doesn’t think he’ll be okay if he has to stop her, if he has to take it from her.

She ducks through the ribbons that mark the area safe from the undead, starts down the stairs.

Tyler pops around a corner, and Jamie tells him “Get the rest of the outside team. Meet us on the ground.” For once, Tyler takes a fucking instruction without getting his back up. 

They’re all there when Kate gets to the gate, singing and murmuring to the poor dead baby. She struggles with the buckled belts they’ve added to the top and bottom the gate with her free hand. Nikki steps up to open them, and she steps out as soon as the gate is free. The outside team rushes to push back the few blighted that are lingering by. Hold them off and take them down while she steps lightly through the corpses. Finds one she deems acceptable and tucks the bundle safely under a dead hand. 

Jamie thinks he’s going to break, struggling for breath. 

“Okay now,” he tells Kate. She doesn’t fight when he gets hold of her arm, draws her back. She doesn’t have any shoes on. “Good job, but it’s done now.” 

“They’re coming,” Tyler says, not-loud, not hurrying the hoard that’s stumbling their way. 

Kate lifts her head, looks at the oncoming wall of shambling dead and nods, once, and steps towards the gate. 

Nikki takes Kate’s hand and takes her up the stairs, and the rest go up too, out of sight of the dead. Tyler leans his ass against the rail when they get to the second floor and half doubles over, breathing harder than the fight could have warranted.

“You okay?” Jamie asks, wishing the others weren’t here to see it if Tyler can’t keep his shit together. Doesn’t want him embarrassed by showing what all of them are feeling. 

Tyler makes a retching noise, but nothing comes up. He spits over the balcony, nods, and straightens. 

“This fucking shit,” he mutters, and Jamie can’t argue with that. 

Loui has the mother wrapped up when they get back, the sheets wet with bathwater, red at the wrists. 

They carry her down instead of throwing her off the balcony. 

“Don’t. Don’t tell Mikaela,” Loui says as the lay her down near her baby. 

“I don’t think we need to tell anybody up there,” Jamie says. He sure as hell wishes he didn’t know, hadn’t seen. 

 

==================


	19. Chapter 19

They work. Until the sun goes down, they work downstairs, breaking through and securing the ground floor, carting food and perishables upstairs. Looking through apartments for weapons, for supplies, for the strange list that Ofelia and Kara and Eduardo have given them (potted plants, paper shredder, clear plastic, tape of any kind, aluminum foil, baggies, baking bags, bleach, vinegar, thermometers, batteries, flashlights). When the cart is full, they take turns running it up, coming back down with snacks and water, Kara using the last of the bread, lunch meats, fresh tomato, before it goes bad.

They go up to eat lunch. The list grows by: Drano, batteries (more places to look for them), walkie-talkies (they can hope), camping gear, alcoholic beverages of any kind, salt, funnels, car keys.

The first door they open that’s not marked as animals or blighted is under renovation, the kitchen pulled apart, cabinets gone, plumbing hanging out of the wall. The fridge turned off and covered in plastic. No food at all, but tools. A big wrench and a pry-bar, hammers and screwdrivers and a power saw, a ladder leaning against the far wall. Alfonse whistles low and awed, like they just found bars of gold, the treasure of tools worth far more than money. 

The last apartment of the day, Tyler is in the bedroom, searching the closet. Puts his hand on the top shelf even though he can’t see anything from the ground, and feels something long and cold wrapped in cloth. His heart pounds, and he goes to get a chair, climbs up where he can see it before he goes messing around. 

The bundle is two firearms, a .22 rifle, and a 12-gauge shotgun, if they match the boxes of ammo pushed against the wall behind them. He’s not comfortable with guns, doesn’t know them well enough to trust them not to go off at random.

“Jamie!” He calls, and Nikki pokes her head in.

“He ran the cart up. Whatcha need?”

He knows, he knows she’s not going to take the guns and kick him out. Knows everybody here is all in this together. He can’t make himself speak though, can’t make himself tell her.

“Nothing,” he says, and she gives him a look like she knows for a fact that it’s not nothing. 

“I’ll tell him to come in here when he gets back,” she says to him, her voice flat and hard. 

“Thanks,” he says, tries to convey that it’s for sending Jamie in and for putting up with his dickish ways.

He searches the rest of the room, finds two thousand dollars in an envelope taped to the underside of a drawer, another box of ammo that doesn’t fit either gun in with the men’s underwear. He flips the mattress and searches the boxsprings. By the time Jamie gets back, he’s sure there’s nothing he’s missing. 

“What’s up?” Jamie asks as he steps in, frowns as Tyler closes the bedroom door behind him. 

“Guns,” Tyler says, and it’s at once a relief to have them, because if people with guns come, they’re going to need their own, but it’s also a load of stress he doesn’t need, two guns between twelve people, who to give them to, who to trust. 

Jamie doesn’t mock him for not touching them, climbs up on the chair and looks them over where they are, tucks them under his arm and climbs down. “They look good. Clean.”

Tyler nods, glad someone else is in charge of it. 

“I’ll take them up now, put them away. We’ll talk about it tonight, figure out who knows how to use them.”

“Eduardo, maybe,” Tyler says. “He shot a pistol fine, when we were on the way here.” Possession can change in a heartbeat, but he’d like it if one of his guys started out with some control. 

“He’s not usually in the thick of it too,” Jamie says, and yeah, that makes sense too, adding to their fighting numbers instead of trading a stick-jock for a gunman. 

Tyler shudders a breath out. “Yeah. Yeah, that too.”

Jamie lays the guns on the dresser while they load the cart up again, the street getting dark outside the windows. Tyler finds a big duffle bag in the closet and fills it up with groceries. Nobody ever wastes a trip up the ramp. The cart that Dion rode in on is loaded in the kitchen, cardboard tied across the end they had cut out. 

“Come on, time to go up,” Jamie calls. Alfonse and Nikki and Tom join them in the living room of a stranger’s apartment. 

“Already?” Alfonse asks, even if he looks glad of the news. “Can’t be later than seven.”

“I want everybody up at dark,” Jamie says. “If we still want to keep running after that, we can find something to do on our floor.”

===========

Jamie pushes the cart with the firearms on it as they go up. From what Tyler said, about having a gun and a truck and some guy taking them away, from the way he looked when he closed the door, closed out everybody but the two of them, he’s surprised that Tyler even let him touch them. 

It’s been a while since he handled guns. Three summers ago, maybe four, out hunting with Jordie and their dad, before he got too busy for all of that, before he shot up six inches in height and traded his focus on baseball to hockey.

When they get up, he takes the guns off of the top of the cart and picks his phone off of the island where it’s charging and goes straight to the second bathroom for some privacy, dialing Jordie’s number as he walks.

It doesn’t go through. There’s an automated message about cell carriers and network availability bullshit. 

He tries his parent’s house. Jenny’s cell and home numbers.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. 

He tries not to take it as something bad. It’s not like their phones are ringing and not getting picked up. He can handle this on his own. The guns look clean enough, well-used enough that he’s not _actually_ scared of them blowing up in his face. 

It would just be nice to have a family member to talk him through it. 

============

Tyler watches Jamie head into the bedroom. The door closes, and the familiar discomfort of having nothing to do prickles along his nerves. Alfonse is unpacking his cart, so Tyler gets to work too, putting the odds and ends from the special requests list into matching piles on the island. They’re going to have to get some shelves in here or something, see what they can move or build or stack up. 

He puts the cold food into the fridge, or would if Kara didn’t take the cartons of eggs from him. She has pots boiling on the stove, and she fishes a dozen eggs out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon, puts them in a pan of water in the sink to cool, lowers the new eggs into the hot ones. There are a couple big jars lined up on the counter, half-full of clear or yellow or pink liquid.

“Keep an eye out for more of these,” she says, tapping the glass. “This size is best, smaller if you have to. They need to be small enough to go in the biggest pot I have so I can boil them clean before I fill them up.”

Jamie comes out of the bathroom, his frown twisting into look of disgust. “Oh geeze, that smell is _inside_? What _is_ that?”

“Pickled eggs,” Kara says. “Nine hundred calories a dozen, should last a month or so, I think.”

Jamie looks like he’s swallowing down his reaction, toning it down. “Yeah. That’s uh, good thinking. That’s where the vinegar is going?” 

She nods. “Most of it, a little of the salt.”

Jamie looks like he really doesn’t want to know what they’re doing with the rest.

“Kate?” he asks instead. 

“Dion put her to work,” Kara says, and Tyler has a hard time imagining Dion putting that many words together to a stranger. “They’re a couple apartments down with Darius. They’re pre-freezing some water, to give us the most time possible. We’re trying to plan it like the power could go out any minute. I think he’s got Kate busy shredding paper for Ofelia’s gardening project.”

Tyler stacks a candy-thermometer next to the collection of meat thermometers and ones he’d found on windows to tell the weather.

“Kate was. Her feet were red,” Kara says. “Where did you find her?”

Tyler turns to get another armload of supplies out of the shopping cart, leaving that one for Jamie to field.

“She wandered to Loui. There was a messy room down there.” He does a better job of the lie than Tyler would have. It probably helps that looking uncomfortable fits the story.

“Oh. Sorry then, that I sent Darius down for you guys. We should have—”

“No, no,” Jamie interrupts her. “That was fine. We’d rather lose a few minutes work than risk losing one of us.”

Tyler watches Kara take that in, the little pleased twitch of her lips. 

“Hey,” Tyler says, “What should I do with the Drano?”

“Eduardo needs that. Says it’s for a juvenile delinquent project of some kind.” Kara says, gesturing at the spare bedroom and beyond, to wherever the other group is at, and speak of the devil, Eduardo steps through the door, eyebrows raised, curious.

“This yours?” Tyler asks, holding up the containers, and Eduardo’s face turns to a grin as he takes them. 

“Yes! I’m gonna get some bottle-bombs ready to go for next time we need some noise.”

Jamie’s eyes go wide and Tyler shrugs. Shows him it’s no big deal. Eduardo is the smart one. It’s not like he’ll let the kids around it or blow one up in his own face. 

Eduardo puts the drain cleaner aside and checks out the duffle bag that Tyler brought down.

“Keep an eye out for these too. Little smaller than this one, maybe. I’m putting packs together for everyone. In case we have to leave in a hurry.”

Tyler’s stomach sinks. “What? Why would we have to leave?”

Eduardo shakes his head, won’t meet Tyler’s eyes. “I was just. Putting bags together for me and Dion and Darius, to replace what we lost getting to where we met you. Didn’t seem right to not make them for everybody.”

“No, that’s smart,” Jamie says. “Some kind of backup plan.”

Eduardo snorts. Of course it’s smart, Tyler thinks. It’s _Eduardo_.

 

================

Three days later, it’s cool heading-towards cold when they go out the apartment door to head to work (looking for scissors, a snake or lizard tank with a heat-lamp, kid’s clothes, diapers). Jamie has a bad feeling about it as he goes back in for jackets for himself and Tyler. The changing weather is a tangible measure of days passed, the world continuing to turn even as hell spreads over its surface.

They get down to the third floor, pick up where they left off. Hoping not to find another cluster of dead refugees, people clumped together for shelter, slaughtered when someone opened the door and the dead found them. Dreading finding another suicide. He wants to see the end of his fuckup, see the last of the people who died because he wasn’t smarter or better at planning it all out, people who died because he was visiting with his boyfriend instead of fighting for their lives. 

“We need to think about the stairs,” Tyler says as they stop to drink some water, eat the food from someone else’s kitchen. Jamie thinks it will never stop feeling like stolen hospitality, just going into a home that isn’t his and helping himself.

“What about them?” he asks. He watches Tyler from the corner of his eye, trying to figure if he actually seems older, or if it’s just losing the mohawk that gives that impression. It had broken Jamie’s heart when Tyler met him two mornings ago, shy and uncertain, hand running over the short dark hair where Kara had cut the pink away. Now, it just seems different. Not better or worse, and Tyler doesn’t seem to mourn the loss.

Tyler shrugs. “Maybe make them harder to get up, if the dead get in, but not so hard that we can’t get up. Or down, if we need to. Crowd control kind of stuff.” 

Jamie nods, adds the project to the growing list in his head. Tries to imagine funnel-points that would break up a wave of the dead, narrow it to a one-person stream. So fucking much work that needs doing. They’d found a furniture dolly the day before, so they can move just about anything they need to, now. There are 225 ovens at their disposal, nearly that many washers and driers. If they need to make a blockade, they have the blocks. 

“Figuring out a way to get in and out without leading the dead up on those gates would be good too,” Tyler adds, and that’s a harder order. Jamie will have to think on that one.

They go back to work, and just short of lunchtime, the lights flicker in the bathroom Jamie is searching. He freezes, looking up, burning a bright spot on his vision staring at the bulb. It shines bright for long seconds and then flickers again, and then out. 

“Shit,” he breathes, and grabs what he had set on the counter to take, and then he heads for the central part of this apartment, meets up with Tyler and Nikki, sees on their faces that it wasn’t just his room that went dark.

“Up,” Jamie says, knowing the others will be heading there too. They’re just one level below Jamie’s apartment and the warren of tunnels they’ve cut through the walls up there. They each know the apartment they’re supposed to head for. Nikki splits off as they get to the right floor, heading to meet Eduardo at his freezer.

Jamie and Tyler have 422 and 424, and they go in, get to work. Alfonse already disconnected the ice-makers and water-dispensers, so all they have to do is pull the plug to get the fridge away from the wall. Tyler shakes out the first of the stack of blankets off of the counter, and he and Jamie wrap them around the back side of the refrigerator, using braided cloth ropes that Ofelia made to tie them around. Kara has a list, of the order to open them in. Jamie thinks that twelve was a little optimistic, but he wasn’t about to be the voice of discouragement. There is a thermometer in each of the last six on Kara’s list. Hopefully that’ll save them from getting food poisoning when the time comes. 

They finish their second wrap-job and head back to Jamie’s place. He thinks he needs a better name for it. Base-camp or something. It’s not really just his anymore. To call it ‘home’ seems…dangerous. 

Tyler leads the way through the door, and Kara is waiting for them. She looks dull. Out of it. 

“All wrapped up?” Jamie asks her, when she doesn’t ask him.

She nods. “All. All twelve. It’s just.”

He waits, listens. Lets her find her words. 

“It’s just twelve fucking days. If that. What the. What the hell, what good is it?” Her face twists, the horrible weight of being six days scared to death showing on her face. 

He’s never heard her swear before, not like this. 

“Hey,” he says. “Hey, that’s twelve days we wouldn’t have had. Twelve days to figure things out, get things going. That’s important. That’s good work.”

Tyler steps closer to her, hovers like he wants to offer a hug but isn’t sure that’s okay.

Kara takes a shuddering breath, and Jamie doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to deal with it if she tips over into actual tears. 

“Look,” Tyler says, gentle. “Come on, it’s done. You did everything you could. We all did.” He reaches out for her hands and she doesn’t pull away. He looks exhausted, and Jamie wonders if he didn’t see it, or if Tyler was hiding it. Dark circles like bruises under his eyes. Kara too now that he’s looking.

They probably all look like shit. Probably all feel as tired and sore and exhausted as he does.

“Hey. Water’s still coming strong, so this actually is the last chance to get a hot shower.”

Kara shakes her head. “No. I should…” 

“Is there anything that’ll be better taken care of now than in an hour?” 

She pauses, shakes her head. “I was making lunch. It’s either going to cook or it isn’t, and not-opening the pot will help not hurt. Dishes…”

“Fuck it,” Jamie says, nods his head, decided. “Go get some clothes and pick a bathroom. Stand in the shower as long as you want, as long as the hot water lasts. Or, or take a long hot bath.” Women like baths, right? “Tell anybody you see on the way to do the same.” There are ten apartments attached, opened up in a string off of Jamie’s. Half of them with two bathrooms. 

“You too,” he tells Tyler when Kara heads off to tell Mikaela what’s going on. “Tell everybody else, unless they have something urgent going on.”

Tyler nods, starts to walk off and then pauses. 

“Which one are you taking?” 

They haven’t showered together since Tyler got back, since the last time they got off together, since everybody fucking died downstairs. 

Jamie shakes his head. “I’ll keep watch. Somebody has to.” 

For a second, he thinks Tyler’s about to pull a stubborn on him. That he’s unhappy enough with Jamie, his decision, to put off his shower while they argue about it.

“I’ll make sure they save you a water-heater,” he says, checking Jamie up and down like he hasn’t been really looking deep either. Like he’s puzzled and a little dismayed by what he’s seeing.

Jamie swallows hard and looks down. 

He goes, through the second bedroom and gone, and Jamie is left alone. Loui goes through to Mikaela and Kara must have gone through their closet and further down that direction. Jamie can hear the shower running in the master bedroom, the baby fussing quietly and Loui making soothing sounds to her, soft words Jamie wouldn’t be able to understand even if they weren’t in Swedish. 

He looks out the window, at the bumbling mass of dead down there. Dread aches through his bones, the fear that he’s doing the wrong thing, that he’s letting these people down. 

He waits and watches, until Tyler comes back, the short fuzz of his hair spiky and damp, his eyelashes dark and heavy with water. He’s wearing a white button-down and dark pants, his feet bare and dusted white with drywall dust. 

“I laid you clothes and towels and a flashlight in the bathroom at the end,” Tyler says, watching Jamie like this is something important, like he’s missing something big. 

“Okay,” Jamie says, because he doesn’t know what, and he’s too tired to figure it out now.


	20. Chapter 20

Tyler crosses paths with Dion in the next apartment’s living room. Dion is walking, slow and careful and with a hell of a limp, but he’s not wrapping his knee to the bar from a towel rack anymore. 

“Hey,” Tyler says. “You working on something that needs to be done right this minute?”

Marshall comes barreling up to Tyler and he crouches to scratch her ears, the other dogs coming up behind her, demanding their share of attention. 

Dion shakes his head. “Nah. Gotta find from Kara, what we need to do next.”

“She’s gone the other way,” Tyler says. “Jamie says take a break. Find a shower, use up the last of the hot water before it goes cold anyway.” 

Dion nods. Turns to limp the other way, exhaustion in the line of his shoulders, the hesitancy of his steps. They’re getting worn down, all of them. Doing more than people were made to do. 

Tyler goes, past the next living room where Tom and Loui moved shelves in front of the windows and Ofelia filled them with flower pots, tin cans, styrofoam cups, jars of water, all with green growing things starting to live. The sight makes him weirdly nervous. That’s going to be their lives, their food. It all looks so fragile.

He finds a bathroom nobody else is using, reaches down into the tub full of cold still water and pulls the plug, letting the water, so carefully stored up, go down the drain. While that’s going, he pokes around the apartment. There’s not much of use left, but there are some boxer briefs that won’t fall off his hips, a t-shirt and workout pants. He pauses then, looking at this stranger’s closet. They need more of a break than the time it takes to run out of hot water. They need to sit and breathe. They’re good people, all of them, and nobody is going to stop until everybody is going to stop. Jamie…Tyler isn’t sure he has it in him to rest. Not unless Tyler can make him.

He rifles through the closet, and picks out a white button-down shirt, straight black slacks that are close enough to his size that he can belt them on. 

He’s got a plan now, and that plan does not include sacrificing what could be the last hot shower of his life, so he takes it, the bathroom door open to let daylight in so he can save the battery. Washes his hair and skin with the shampoo that’s on the back corner of the tub. Random scent of the day is hyper-masculine, musky and heavy like cologne, and he scrubs as much of it off of himself as he can as the water goes from hot to warm and warm to cool. 

He dries off and puts on the clothes while the tub refills with water supply. He looks himself over in the mirror, half of his face in shadow. He’s not really used to dressing for a look that’s anything more defined than ‘available.’ Getting the right balance of dressed up and relaxed to make it look like he’s not doing anymore grunt labor until morning is a little more subtle, but he thinks the unbuttoned collar and sleeves rolled up around his forearms are doing the trick. 

Finding clothes for Jamie is more difficult, and he goes two apartments down, ignores Dion and Eduardo fucking in the shower as he digs through clothes. Flannel shirt, jeans. He considers putting a pair of panties he finds in the pile, but doesn’t think they’d fit. Or be received with the same sense of humor he would give them with. Still, that mental image is one for the spank bank and he files it away for later.

That apartment is as good as any, and he pulls the plug in the tub, pokes around for a towel to put out. 

Jamie is looking out the window when he comes back, lit by the midday sunlight, his eyes worried and serious. It’s only been a week, but Jamie is measurably different, the way he carries the responsibilities. They’ve all lost some weight, in just this short time. Six days of all-day hard work and effort. Even for the athletes, it’s more than they’re used to. It really shows on Jamie, who’d had a little bit of a baby-fat softness about him. He’s narrower through the torso, his jaw more defined, his cheekbones sharper.

“I laid you clothes and towels and a flashlight in the bathroom at the end,” Tyler says, and Jamie nods, disjointed and exhausted. Tired and sad like all of them but something more too. Tyler follows behind, making sure Jamie gets to the right room and that he actually goes in. 

They’ve seen each other naked before. Got each other off. Tyler knows what Jamie’s dick tastes like. They haven’t fucked around, not since the night Tyler got back, but they still sleep pressed against each other, Jamie’s arms around him.

It still feels wrong to hang out while Jamie steps out of his pants. While he takes this last luxury, this last taste of the old world. 

“I’ll be. Back that way, keeping watch,” Tyler says, because he doesn’t want Jamie worried about that. 

Jamie makes a noise, and it doesn’t sound like a “No, don’t leave; I want you close” noise, so Tyler goes.

He comes across Kate on his way back, sitting in a living room, mechanically tearing strips of magazine pages and putting them in a garbage bag. 

He knows Dion had her doing that, but it doesn’t need doing now. “Hey,” he says to her, and she looks up, tracks his voice to his face. “Hey, it’s bath time. Last hot water of the year.”

She doesn’t move until he goes to her, until he takes her hand and gently pulls her up. She moves like a puppet, following his guide. He, okay, he wouldn’t do anything not-cool with her like this, but he _could_ and the idea of it makes his stomach squirm. That she’s walking around all not-safe in the world. 

“Let’s go find Kara or Nikki. Get you a tub before these assholes take them all,” he says, and she follows him through the gaps in the walls, through closet doors and stranger’s homes. He wonders which one was hers, wonders if she even knows anymore.

Kara and Mikaela are in the kitchen of Jamie’s place when they get there, Kara holding the baby while Mikaela eats. He catches a snatch of what Kara’s saying, a bit of “ _This_ is your job. You and this baby. And you’re doing really good with that. We’ve got the rest of all this. There’s plenty of us.”

“Hey,” Tyler says, since there’s a gap as Mikaela thinks about that. “Is Nikki around? I thought Kate could use a bath too, since they’re going fast.”

“I’ll get her started,” Kara says, and takes the baby and just _puts_ her in Tyler’s arms. It’s seriously the scariest thing to happen to him in days, and he is terrified to hold too tight or too lose. He’s seen enough dramatic TV to know he’s gotta support her head. Kara watches him for just a second, and he rocks a little, like Kate had with…shit. Not gonna think about that now. 

“Hey there sweetheart,” he croons, like he’s talking to a puppy. She blows a spit bubble on her lip and he counts himself lucky she didn’t start screaming as soon as he touched her. She’s wearing a tiny pink jumpsuit that’s so small it doesn’t need non-skid rubber on the feet. He won’t think about where that came from either. 

Akshaya climbs up a stool and across the bar to sit closer to the baby. Her long hair is tangled to mats, dirt on her cheek. He’ll have to get one of the women to get her a bath too. He thinks. They’ll be better at taking care of the kids, taking care of themselves, now that the rush to get stuff done before the power goes out is over. 

Mikaela quirks a smile at the sight of Akshaya adjusting Tyler’s hands around the baby. She looks tired, worn and pale. No makeup. Dark circles under her eyes. She’s still the kind of pretty that makes him nervous even though his dick takes no interest at all. The kind of lady that a boy like him has no business talking to.

“Are you all doing okay?” he asks, flailing for conversation, unable to take the quiet.

She nods and slices another rectangle of cheese off of the block. “We are okay. She is a good baby.” Mikaela hesitates. “Today was the due day. The day she was supposed to come. When I think…”

“Yeah,” he says when she trails off. He can see it’s hard for people like her. Like most of them. To have had a plan and then this happened to it. He doesn’t know what he would have been doing if the dead hadn’t decided to get up and hunt people. Jamie’s brother would be down by now, Tyler figures. It’s possible that wouldn’t have been a shitfest. Or maybe he’d be looking for somewhere to crash over the winter. Maybe he’d be on his way to Austin. Who the fuck knows. 

“If you need anything. I mean, no guarantees I can find it, but if you tell us, we’ll try. Even stuff you just want.”

“Thank you, Tyler,” she says, almost formally, and even her voice is pretty—soft and melodic, with just a hint of an accent. She passes Akshaya a bit of cheese too, watches until she eats it. 

“Loui says…” she starts again, and Tyler looks up at her. 

“Loui says we will be fine here. That they cannot get in.”

Tyler can’t pretend it’s not a question. He leans down over Elle and nuzzles her cloud-fine baby hair. 

“I don’t know the future,” he says. He won’t be the one to lie to her, but he doesn’t want to say the truth too harsh if Loui has been making it sound better than it is. “But I think it’s looking pretty okay right now. As long as we don’t go near the gates, they don’t mess with them. And we’ve got food and a lot of water.”

“No power,” she says. “No heat. Winter coming.”

Tyler nods. It’s not that her worries are groundless. 

“I’m not sure what winter’s like where you come from, but I’ve seen Toronto, Boston and North Carolina. Dallas is a lot better than any of those. It’ll maybe snow a few times. We’ll get some ice and some freezing rain, but we’ll be inside for it, hopefully.” He doesn’t mention Eduardo making them up emergency bags, in case they have to leave here. If they have to leave in the winter, the baby in his arms is going to have a hard time. Akshaya too and Darius some. Kids get sick, get cold. He doesn’t know what they’ll do if they have to move.

“We’ve got a lot here,” he goes on. “Blankets and the carpets. Hell, even the dogs to cuddle up with.”

He looks down at Elle, hoping she’s too young to pick up his bad language. 

“We’ve got smart people. We’ll figure out a way to keep you guys warm,” he promises. Eduardo will come up with something, or Dion will build it. Maybe Alfonse—he seems good with his hands. He built Mikaela and Akshaya emergency bunkers out of clothes driers. Tyler trusts that _somebody_ will figure it out.

Mikaela nods, like Tyler’s take on it is worse than Loui was telling her, but better than she figured on her own. Or maybe it’s just better to know.

Kara comes back, the sleeves of her shirt wet to the elbows, but she doesn’t look worried or upset. “Nikki took over,” she says. “If you don’t mind keeping Elle, I’ll start on lunch.”

Tyler shrugs. “Up to you. I can cook if you tell me what the plan is.”

She gives him a funny look, like she wasn’t expecting that from him, and he feels like he’s doing it wrong. “Or I can shut up and hold the baby.”

“Let me lay it out,” she says, “And I’ll let you finish it up.”

==============

The shampoo in the shower Tyler picked for him is all apples or strawberries and Jamie comes out of it glad he doesn’t have to worry about bee attacks in November. There’s an outfit laid out under the towels, lumberjack red plaid and a pair of jeans, socks and underwear. 

He gets dressed, feeling guilty for being gone so long, guilty for not using the last of the hot water like he was supposed to. 

What used to be his apartment is crowded when he gets back, and he does a quick head-count. Nikki and Kara. The three Swedes. Alfonse and Ofelia, Dion and Eduardo, Akshaya and Darius, baby Elle in Tyler’s arms. 

“Hey,” Kara says, “We’re trying to eat through the last of the food that didn’t make it to the freezer. I had a day’s worth, cooked and packed that didn’t get frozen, and lunch for today was salvageable. Figured we might as well make the best of it.”

Tyler watches him, chin up, challenging but not angry at him. He wishes he knew what the kid was thinking, what he could do to make it right, whatever the hell it is.

“Yeah, good thinking,” he says, and a plate appears in front of him, some heavy chicken salad mess with boiled egg and chopped apples in it, piled high on a slice of bread. He takes his plastic fork, and Tyler uses the lower rung of his stool to hop up onto the island without jarring the baby. Jamie takes the empty stool, sits and eats, looks around at his people while he stuffs his face.

He thought they’d look crushed. That the loss of electricity would hit them hard. The showers seem to have helped though, and maybe Tyler dressing up a little. They look refreshed, better than they had that morning. Kara is wearing a kind of floofy shirt, and Nikki’s shoulders are bare. A definite change from the t-shirts they’ve been in. 

Jamie eats, leaning back against the bar, Tyler’s knees on either side of his shoulders. Loui comes and takes his baby, and Eduardo dumps a scoop of icecream and some kind of chocolate cream pie on Tyler’s plate. 

“Hey,” Tyler says, and Jamie twists around to look at him. “I was thinking. We still don’t have anything that _has_ to be done today. I mean, the kitchen, we’ll work together to clean that up. But besides that. I thought. Maybe it would be better for everybody to hang out here, go to bed early, get a good night’s sleep and start again fresh?”

“The water’s still running…” Jamie says. He needs. Something. To be doing something. 

“Alfonse says that every apartment’s water heater is full of thirty gallons of clean water. Two hundred and some apartments, that’s like sixty-thousand gallons.”

“Six thousand,” Jamie corrects. It still seems like a lot. Even if they’re using it to wash and flush the toilets, it seems like plenty. They’ll need a plan later, and it won’t hurt if they store some more tomorrow, but yeah. He can’t justify working them (or himself) into the ground for that.

He swallows, trying to digest the idea of an afternoon with nothing to do. 

“Was that a guitar I saw in your closet?” Tom asks, teasing, and it startles a snort out of Jamie. He feels color rising on his cheeks, his secret exposed. “You gonna play for us, right?”

“No, no,” he groans, hides his face with his hands. Everybody is looking at him now. Tyler’s knees squeeze in on his sides. 

Elle blows a raspberry and the attention swings away from Jamie. Tyler leans down, whispers “They need this,” in his ear. And as much as Jamie hates sitting still, as much as he feels like he’s _failing_ when he’s not getting anything done, he can see that they do, see how good it is for them. 

He sighs, and leans back into the V of Tyler’s legs, lets himself relax for the first time in days.


	21. Chapter 21

The end of the world party is one of the best that Tyler’s been to. They sacrifice one of the bottles of liquor and everybody gets just a little easy, a little loose. Jamie has enough that he doesn’t object when Tom brings the guitar out and puts it in his hands. He strums idle chords while Tyler hums along, Nikki sings. 

A few hours before sunset, Loui and Alfonse and Tyler get up from the gathering and get to work. Kara cooked, so they clean, washing the dishes and leaving them to drip dry in the dishwasher’s racks. 

It starts to get dark, and people drift off to where they’ve been sleeping—Mikaela and Loui in the old master bedroom, Akshaya to her little bed in their room. Nikki, Kara and Ofelia take Kate through the wall and into the bedroom of the neighboring apartment, where the dogs in the living room are between them and the door to the outside. The most-crowded is the room the men share-- Jamie and Tyler, Alfonse, Tom, Dion and Eduardo, Darius, all packed in on the most compact mattresses, piles of pillows. 

Tyler lets everybody else head to bed, tugs on Jamie’s hand when he would follow them, draws him back down to the couch. 

“I thought…” he says, and Jamie looks at him like he has no idea what Tyler’s thinking, no idea what he’s planning. And to hell with that. Tyler leans in and bumps their lips together, waits for Jamie’s sigh, waits for his lips to part and then he teases his tongue against them. 

Jamie makes a little gasp, the sweetest sound Tyler’s ever heard. Relief pushes against his breastbone, that Jamie is on board with this, that Jamie still wants him. He hadn’t really thought, but…people get fucked up, turned around, change their minds. 

“Yeah,” Tyler breathes into Jamie’s mouth, “Yeah, there you are. Missed you.” 

Jamie’s hands grab at his waist, too-rough and just-perfect, a groan in his throat like he’s trying to hold back. 

Tyler planned to do this slow, gentle. But he burns with wanting, aches with too many nights of being close and not _together_. He nips Jamie’s lower lip, harder than he intended; Jamie hisses and jerks back. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Tyler whispers. The sky gets darker, and the room with it; the subtleties of Jamie’s expression get lost in the shadows.

Jamie holds him back when he leans in to try and lick where he bit. 

“We can’t…” Jamie starts, and frustration fills Tyler’s guts, that he let Jamie have time to think, time to deny himself this. “What if somebody comes out?” 

“Why?” Tyler asks. “There’s nothing out here.” And okay, maybe one of the guys would need to use the toilet in the night, but how likely is it that they’d need to use it _now_? 

“They are grown damn people; they’ll survive if they catch an eyefull,” Tyler grits out, reminding himself that this is their good time, and yelling at Jamie will make it a bad time instead. 

Jamie’s breath catches, and when Tyler leans into him again, he doesn’t lock his elbows to keep him back. Tyler slows it down, hands drifting Jamie’s sides, letting Jamie touch him back. 

They make out like teenagers on the couch (the kind of teenagers that Tyler has never been, fifteen and wild and horny and dumb. Sixteen and hollow, broken. Seventeen and this, hungry and sure). Tyler pushes Jamie back, inch by inch, until he’s shoved into the corner with his shoulders over the arm of the couch, his neck awkward and bent. 

“Let’s…” Jamie whispers, like the others are listening, like they care. Shifts around and gets flat under Tyler and yeah, that’s okay, that’s good. He covers Jamie with his weight, presses him down, hips against each other, denim and dress pants between them, too much, too many stupid layers. He wants Jamie’s skin, wants Jamie’s dick in his hand. Wants. Wants Jamie’s dick inside of him, fuck. Fuck, it’s going to hurt, spit for lube and Jamie’s short fat dick that’s not made for ass-fucking. 

“I want. Want you to fuck me,” he pants against Jamie’s neck, presses his lips so hard against Jamie’s shoulder that they bruise against his teeth. Wants to bite but the act has lost a lot of its sex-appeal in the past few days. 

Jamie goes still under him, hands holding Tyler’s shoulders, not pushing him away, not pulling him close. 

“Nobody’s coming out,” Tyler reminds him, trying to shut down the flutter of dread in his stomach. He wants. To give this to Jamie. Wants to be marked and made-different by it. 

“Why?” Jamie asks, and he’s looking now, trying to see Tyler’s face in the fading light, trying to read him. “Why that? You said. Said you weren’t into it. Didn’t like it.”

Tyler rolls his hips against Jamie’s, tries to distract Jamie from this line of thought. Jamie frowns up at him, and it’s pretty obvious there’s going to be no more of anything until he’s heard Tyler’s reasons and is satisfied. 

It would make things a lot easier if Tyler had good reasons, had more than this ache that needs to be filled, that has little do do with his ass and a lot to do with his heart. 

“I need…” and that sounds so soft, sounds like he couldn’t do without it, without Jamie. “I want to. To be that. To be that close to you.” He clenches his jaw, tries to keep whatever is coming after that behind his teeth. 

Jamie’s hand moves from Tyler’s shoulder, up behind his neck, squeezing, cupping the base of his skull. “No,” he says, gentle but sure. “I’m not. I won’t. Won’t hurt you like that.”

Jamie’s kiss is so gentle. The complete opposite of what Tyler asked for. But perfect, and he sinks down into it. Loses himself in the scent of Jamie’s skin, in the brush of their lips against each other. 

Tyler was so ready, to be tough and take it. Jamie’s gentleness breaks him open, sends him shaking and blinking the blurriness from his his eyes. 

“Hey,” Jamie says, soft, petting Tyler’s short hair, stroking his neck. Tyler takes a slow breath and gets his head back in the game.

“Yeah,” he says, means _I’m here. I’m okay._ “I want. Want to touch you.” 

Jamie draws in a gasp through his teeth. Tyler takes that for encouragement, rolls to the side just enough to work one-handed at Jamie’s jeans button, Jamie’s arm around him keeping him from falling off of the couch. He slips his fingers inside the opened fly and finds Jamie’s skin, finds his dick, hard and thick. 

“Ty,” Jamie moans, his hips jerking forward as Tyler wraps his hand around his dick, as he strokes. 

“Yeah,” Tyler gasps back. He’s hard too, still in his dress pants, but he trusts Jamie not to leave him hanging if they don’t come together. This, Jamie in the dark, his soft gasps and moans as Tyler jerks him off, it’s a hell of a sexy thing. Feeling him, hearing him, eyes struggling to piece the shadows into a face. 

Jamie comes quiet, pressing his forehead into Tyler’s shoulder, hands tight on his back. Gasping and choking back his cries. 

“Yeah,” Tyler says again, wipes the jizz on his hand off on his pants, works the zipper down while he’s there. Pulls his dick out while Jamie is still catching his breath.

He barely gets three pulls in before Jamie has recovered enough to get in there, to slip his hand around Tyler’s, so fucking big, big everywhere, broad palm and fingers that wrap around him and then some. He arches into Jamie’s grip, finds it spit-slick and wet and warm. Hears himself, whining and panting and groaning. Comes in Jamie’s hand, in Jamie’s arms. Is held and safe and done, done in the best ways. 

He huffs and all the strength goes out of him. He flops against Jamie’s chest, limp and spent, nothing left of him. 

They lay like that. Tyler isn’t sure how long. Thinks he might drift off for a bit, comes back with Jamie stroking his back. They’re sticky and gross. He can’t quite get up the enthusiasm to go get a cold wet cloth to clean up with though, so he tucks himself back in his pants and lays his head back on Jamie’s shoulder. 

“We can’t do this every night,” Jamie murmurs, half-asleep. 

That—okay, that hurts a bit. 

“You got something against orgasms now?” Tyler snipes, and Jamie tenses. 

“What? No, no. Not that. The slacking off. Sitting around half the day.”

That doesn’t thrill Tyler either, because he can see Jamie working himself down to nothing, never taking a rest, getting so exhausted he starts to make mistakes. 

“Not every day,” he agrees, “But enough. As much as they need it.” 

Jamie doesn’t answer, and Tyler is pretty sure he’ll be able to bully Jamie into resting, into letting the team rest. 

But not right now, and he closes his eyes. Thinks he’ll have to get up in a little while and get the blanket off of their palette, but not right now. Right now, he is safe and warm-enough. Right now, Jamie is with him, and that’s plenty.


	22. Chapter 22

Jamie wakes up with Tyler in his arms, a blanket thrown over them. His crotch is itchy with flaking come and his neck stiff from sleeping on the couch with Tyler on top of him. His left arm is completely asleep and he makes the mistake of twitching, sending pins and needles of sensation down to his fingertips and back.

He groans and can’t stay still any longer, and Tyler shifts against him, makes it worse.

“Mm. Babe. Ow, my arm,” Jamie mumbles and Tyler nuzzles into his neck one last time before he sits up, kisses Jamie’s jaw and then goes off to the bathroom.

Eduardo and Dion come out while Jamie is trying to massage the feeling back into his hand. Eduardo gives him a sly grin and a waggle of his eyebrows. Jamie guesses they weren’t exactly subtle the night before. It keeps throwing him, that he’s out, that he’s out as Tyler’s boyfriend, and it’s okay. And then he feels a wave of guilt—it’s okay because the NHL is gone. Because the tabloid reporters are dead. Because it’s the end of the fucking world.

Dion limps into the kitchen, puts water into he coffee maker, hits the button. Waits and stares. Jamie’s mouth waters and he could sure as hell use a cup.

“God damn it,” Dion sighs, and Jamie remembers. That the room is only light because the sun is shining. That there will be no hot coffee today.

He groans and sits up, reaches under the blanket Tyler left on him to zip up his jeans. Other people are coming out of the bedrooms now, Kara disappearing with Eduardo. She’s got a plan, a system for exactly what they eat and when, and nobody is willing to mess with it. They come back with cereal (bags that were opened before they got there), milk from multiple fridges, (still cold, packed into freezers when the power went out).

They eat, and Tyler comes back out of the bathroom and sits at his side.

As people finish their meals, they set aside their bowls, look up at Jamie.

“I need to know what everybody thinks is the most urgent projects to work on,” he starts, when everyone is done eating. He looks to Kara, since she’s been the one in charge of feeding them all.

“Um, as far as food goes, we should be okay for about eight to ten days on frozen food, hopefully as much as twelve. We’ll eat out of fridges today, and I’ll open a freezer when we come in for the night. Let it defrost overnight. Today and tomorrow, we might find some good food in freezers or fridges I didn’t pack. There will be stuff in fridges that really didn’t need to be. Peanut butter and jelly have enough preservatives they should be fine for a few weeks even if they’re open. Block cheese should be safe to eat for a little while. Stuff like that. I can make a list. We should move it all into one kitchen up here, if we can.”

Eduardo and Ofelia talk quiet between them, and Eduardo catches Jamie’s eye.

“Ofelia has been saving all the scraps that will grow new plants. Lettuce and carrots, potato, onions. If we could get some help, we could take some of the empty fridges up to the garage roof, lay them on their backs. Put clear plastic shower curtains over them, use them for little greenhouses.”

Jamie nods. That’s fucking brilliant.“Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. We can get a couple people on that.”

“The thing we have the least of,” Eduardo says, “is dirt. So she had us shredding paper before the power went out. If we mix it with food that’s gone bad from the kitchens. Vegetables. It’ll rot down. Give us something to work with. For now though, we can start with the little bit we got from the flower pots.”

“We’ll have to start planning another full sweep of the place,” Jamie says. The first pass was looking for high-value items. They can go back through, look for anything of any use at all, move it all upstairs and sort it out. Toilet paper. They need to bring up all of the toilet paper. “How long are we looking at before we can start harvesting even a little of our food?”

Eduardo and Ofelia have another conversation in Spanish. “This first season is for seeds or it's not gonna be enough to matter,” Eduardo says. “If we come down to eating it all, there will be greens, celery and onion-greens in a few weeks. Potato and sweet potato, next fall. Carrots and pumpkin, she doesn’t know, planting them this time of year. We’re hoping we can use the door of the fridge to turn more sun on the plants, but we aren’t sure yet if it’ll help enough.”

“Fair enough,” Jamie says. It’s not a quick fix, but it should be a resource stream that starts to pick up about when the stored-food starts to run out. He can’t imagine them growing enough to completely feed twelve people, but every little bit will be one more day between them and starvation.

“The food we have,” Kara starts, catches herself and stops. “There’s a lot of it that’s not really edible in the state it’s in. Like—bags of flour. Pancake mix. Even. Even rice, I’m not sure how to make it without a stove.”

“Making a stove is easy,” Alfonse says. “Feeding it’s a whole ‘nother thing. Most of the wood in here’s treated. Can’t burn the cabinets or the doors; it’s’ full of poison. Could pull studs outta the walls, but there ain’t a lot of days worth of that. Not enough.” He says it like he’s been thinking on it for a while, turning the problem over and over in his head, searching for a solution.

“I have an idea for that too,” Eduardo says. “In my internet research, I found instructions for solar ovens. That’s what the foil is for. Or if we can find some of those foil sunshades in the cars. That might work too. Anything shaped like a big bowl, a big curve, would shortcut building it.”

“This time of year?” Tyler asks, and Eduardo shrugs like they’ll have to try it to see.

Jamie files that away.

“Okay, what other problems do we have? We’ve got probably close to ten thousand gallons of water right now, counting what’s in the water heaters, but that won’t last us forever. Could we pull some more of the fridges up to the garage roof, lay them down and catch rainwater in them?”

Alfonse shakes his head. “Nah, not worth it. That one, I got. There’s a gutter up there, so the rain water don’t run down the sides of the building. PVC pipe, comes down in the middle of the garage, down to the sewer. We tap that pipe, funnel it into those fridges direct, should be enough to keep us in water if we work hard. We’ll have to carry it up for the garden, and down here to use, but we’ll have it.”

Jamie guesses that’s another couple days work.

“Sooo…we should stop walking the dogs up there?” Darius asks, and Jamie adds another day of work, using the spring-scent bleach and the last days of running water to clean that up before it becomes their source of drinking water.

“Okay, what else?”

“Winter,” Tyler says, and Jamie realizes he’s been avoiding thinking about it. “We’ve gotta figure out how to keep Mikaela and the kids warm. Us too, but mostly them.”

“Put them in a small room,” Alfonse suggests. “Closet even. Hang blankets on the walls, wrap up in fuzzy blankets to keep the warmth closer to their skin.”

“If we got keys and cars to match,” Dion says, the first time his low voice has spoken in a group meeting. “I could rig up a couple batteries and headlights. Not sure they’d last all night, but it’d be a little warmer. I could charge up the batteries during the day off of the cars, as long as we have gas.”

Those ideas beat Jamie’s first plan of burning something in the apartment to warm them up. Not like yuppies in Dallas have kerosene heaters sitting around.

“The rest of us, we go back to sleeping in one bedroom,” Tyler says, and as much as Jamie’s been appreciating the increase in breathing room, it’s a solid suggestion. “We can cover the windows with blankets, make a bigger nest.”

“Yeah. Okay. Anything else?”

“I think we should go across to the grocery store sometime soon,” Tyler says, and Jamie has to bear down on his gut reaction to say _absolutely fucking not, are you serious?_

“ _Why?_ ” is what he manages to prune his response back to.

“Baby needs diapers,” Tyler answers. “We need to see what’s there that we can use. We need to get what we can before someone else does. Need to get what we can before we run out of supplies here and get desperate. We can’t go into the office here, but we could check out the back room there maybe, see if there’s tools or stuff.”

It’s not that Tyler doesn’t have good reasons. Just. Jamie can’t see them doing it now, taking those risks before they settle the water problem, or get the gardens moved up to the garage roof, or get Mikaela’s nest situated.

“How are we on diapers?” he asks Mikaela and Loui.

“We should be okay for a couple of weeks,” she answers, pats Elle’s back when she starts to fuss. “Maybe not that long.”

“I think we should wait,” Jamie tells Tyler. “We need to figure out how to get in and out without drawing the blighted to the gates. Get some of these immediate projects taken care of.”

He expects a fuss, but Tyler nods, presses his lips together. “Yeah, okay. We were talking about making the halls harder to get through too,” he adds, and Jamie nods.

“That too,” he agrees.

============

They work, all of that first long coffee-less day without power. Check the gates and then split up. Alfonse and Tom work on cutting into the pipe with a hacksaw. Jamie and Tyler and Loui start emptying out and moving the refrigerators, a couple up to the roof so Ofelia and Nikki can start moving the plants in one of the carts. Eduardo brings up the plastic and some tape and starts making them into greenhouses, carefully turned to catch the most sun possible.

Twice, Jamie looks over and sees Tyler looking out the window of whatever apartment they’re in at the time, looking over the dead-filled street, looking down on the grocery store on the other side, quietly calculating.

“I think it should be us to go out,” Tyler says when Jamie comes to stand at his shoulder the second time. “We’re strong, we’re fast. We won’t be splitting up a couple. Won’t be risking all of our good fighters on it.”

Jamie doesn’t answer, and Tyler doesn’t say it again.

At night, they go to bed just as tired as they did when the electricity was still on, tired but feeling like it was a good day again. _Nobody died,_ Jamie tells himself. They made progress. Little steps that should add up to not having to choose between starving and leaving.

Jamie wakes in the moonless black, Tyler slipping out of his arms, standing up, moving away.

“Hey,” he whispers, trying not to wake the rest.

“Shh,” Tyler whispers back. “Just going to take a piss.”

Jamie waits, wide awake. Listening to Tyler’s stumbles through the room and into the bathroom, terrified that he’ll hear the front door opening, that Tyler will try to slip out on him, try to go outside, cross the road. More scared that he won’t hear it. That he’ll wait too long for Tyler to come back to him and miss him leaving.

He’s just about to stand up, to rush out, to wake the house, when the sink turns on in the bathroom, Tyler washing his hands before he stumbles back to bed.

“Promise me,” he whispers in the darkness. “Promise me you won’t go grocery shopping by yourself.”

“I won’t,” Tyler agrees. “Promise.”

He settles back in Jamie’s arms, and they make it through another night.


	23. Chapter 23

Crock pots. Cast-iron pans, ice-chests. Tyler is not even asking, at this point, what the hell Eduardo and the inside-team need this stuff for. 

It would probably have been more-efficient to have had one big list the first time around, but Tyler doesn’t resent being sent back down to the first floor for another search. He figures he’ll take the chance to look around, to see if there’s some way to get in and out that the dead won’t be able to follow. Climbing in a balcony maybe. Maybe using one of the ladders as a bridge over the bushes. He needs to look at it careful though, see if the dead might pile up there, climb up and over themselves and get in. He takes every opportunity to look at the grocery store across the street. Even if it’s picked over, there has to be _something_ there worth having, something that’s not here. Ofelia said even the bales of straw from the Thanksgiving display could be used to grow potatoes in.

He rests his bat on one shoulder, at the ready, and opens the door to 118 and a smell like Satan’s ballsack wafts out at him. He steps back, gagging. 

“What is it?” Jamie asks from down the hall, about to go in his own door. 

“Holy shit,” Tyler says, spitting to try to get the taste of that smell out of his mouth. “Unholy shit. What the hell?”

He pulls his shirt up over his mouth and nose. It doesn’t help, beyond the illusion of being more sanitary. He holds the bat out and goes back in, looking for whatever it is that’s gone horribly wrong down here.

A brown sludge stains the carpet around the bathroom door, and he reaches over and pokes the door open with his bat to avoid stepping in it. 

The bathtub is full. Full and overflowing with watery brownness. He backs out, nearly runs Jamie over at the front door. Not that the air is a lot better out here, but he’ll take the miasma of death over the smell of death plus shit. 

Jamie wipes a hand over his mouth, goes to another of the unlocked doors. Pushes it open. It’s hard to tell, with his sense of smell already overwhelmed by the yuck, but Tyler can see on Jamie’s face that it’s just as bad. 

“Maybe the smell is just coming through the cuts in the wall?” he wonders. Jamie pops in and comes out again just as fast, shaking his head. 

“Ugh. No. It’s in there too. It’s bad. All over the floor. Came up through the full tub of water we had in there.”

“So…we get what we can and abandon the ground floor?” Tyler asks.

Jamie shakes his head. “Let’s ask Alfonse.”

So they go up to the fifth level of the garage and find Alfonse cutting a lower slot into the PVC of the drainage pipe coming down from the garage roof, testing if a carved plastic clipboard fits in it, pulling it out and working some more.

“Hey,” Jamie calls. “Something’s wrong downstairs. The tubs and toilets are backing up. There’s water everywhere.”

“Eduardo has dibs on the Draino, but maybe we could talk him out of some of it?” Tyler asks. It seems like a big job for a few bottles of drain cleaner, but he’s not exactly an expert on this stuff. 

Alfonse stands there, head down, jaw working. “Shit,” he finally says, like this is a big fucking deal. Tyler looks at Jamie and they bob eyebrows at each other. 

“Okay. Okay, we can fix this,” Alfonse says. “I shoulda thought. The power went down. Dallas is too flat. The sewers don’t have much gravity feed; it’s mostly pumps moving the water through. Even then, it comes on the water processing plants. The power goes out, the water treatment plant goes out, everything backs up.”

“We did this?” Jamie asks. “We sent down that much water?”

Alfonse shrugs. “Maybe. There’s a lot of plumbing between us and the end of the sewers. Could be there’s water coming from other places. Wouldn’t take much.”

Other places means other people, maybe. 

“So how do we fix it?” Tyler asks. 

Alfonse sighs and hangs his head. Tyler feels a wave of dread. 

“We go outside and open up the clean-out valve,” Alfonse says. “Our waste water still ain’t going far, but it’ll be in the streets instead of the building. Down the gutter, somebody else’s problem.”

If there’s anybody left to be bothered by it.

“Any idea where the valve is?” Tyler asks, remembering the piles of dead up against the walls, down from both gates for yards in either direction.

Alfonse shrugs. “Should be a few on every side of the building. They all connect, so popping any of them should fix the problem.”

Jamie presses his lips together. “What if we don’t fix it? _Could_ we just abandon the bottom floor?”

Alfonse shrugs, shakes his head. “Not really safe.” He taps the pipe beside him. “When it rains, the clean water’ll run down this, hit the sewage that’s got no where to go, come back up. We risk not having drinking water at all.”

Jamie nods. “Okay. Finish working on the water supply for now. I’ll go downstairs, tell them to lay off the flushing and we’ll start planning a trip outside.”

==============

It’s strange, having everyone so scattered. Tyler follows along as Jamie talks to Kara in the apartment they’re using for storage (Kate and Darius helping her stack and organize the boxes and cans of food), Nikki on the third floor, pushing another cart of groceries, Ofelia and Mikaela in the nursery, Tom and Loui on the fifth floor, moving refrigerators, Eduardo and Dion on the roof. 

“We’ll go out with you,” Tom says. “Watch your back while Alfonse fixes it. Help dig through the dead if we need to.” Loui looks unhappy but doesn’t argue.

“There’s no reason to fight if you don’t have to,” Eduardo says. “There’s already a cluster by the garage doors. We’ll use some noise to get the rest moving that way. Get one of the gates and sides of the building as clear as we can.”

Tyler shakes his head. “We can’t keep going in and out of those gates. They’re not that strong. We fuck up one time, don’t get a diversion running fast enough, and they’ll push through. They’re made for keeping the hobos out, not a riot.”

“Ground floor balconies then?” Dion asks, and Tyler nods, relieved that someone else is thinking of that too. 

“There’s a ladder in one of the apartments. We could run it out, go out over the bushes. Pull it up when we’re back inside. Draw them away with a diversion if there’s so many they’re piling up high enough to be a problem.”

“I can’t go climbing no ladder, but I can pull it up for you guys,” Dion says. 

“We’ll put Eduardo on the rifle,” Jamie says, and Tyler feels that like a weight coming off of his back. “In case it gets bad enough that the bullets help more than the noise drawing the blighted down on us hurts.”

“Don’t…don’t count on too much help,” Eduardo says. “I can’t shoot if they get up close on you, and it’s just one bullet at a time if there’s a wave coming in. If nothing but a head-shot counts…”

That’s totally not what Tyler wanted to hear. Jamie either by the look on his face. 

“I’m thinking we should save the bullets,” Dion says. “In case something comes up that they’ll work better on.” 

People, he means, and Tyler nods. Fucking Brad.

“I’d be more use throwing stuff off, making sure they don’t get that far before they get distracted.”

Jamie nods, and looks to the sun, checking the time. “Do we think we can get the blighted out of the office-side today, and still give us time to work on the drain?”

Eduardo shrugs. “We haven’t wasted too much daylight already. If we can’t do it today, chances are we can’t do it tomorrow.”

“Okay then.” 

They go down, gather the others, share the plan. Alfonse starts picking out the tools he’ll need and the tools he might need. The rest start drawing the deads towards the corners of the building, away from the front office, the second apartment to the side of it where they’re planning to go out. They start with small breakables and then heavier, louder ones-- TVs, computers, small furniture. When they’ve got most of them on the garage side, Eduardo tries a bottle bomb on that side. Adds Draino to a bottle with aluminum foil shreds in it and caps it tight, throws it down into the street. At first Tyler thinks it’s a dud, but then there’s a loud pop, the dead turning towards the spot where the bottle fell. 

When they’ve got the blighted where they want them, they use streamers of shopping bags tied to heavier things as decoys to keep them from wandering off too easily. Kara stares down, a strange look on her face. Sad but wry. “Mom always said there would be a time I’d want to have a bag full of bags.” Tyler figures every mom must have said that, because every apartment they’ve been in has had that bag somewhere.

Late in the afternoon, they figure they’ve got the street as clear as it can be. Their attempts to get the stragglers to move around the building keep attracting more than it moves away, and Tyler thinks they’ve fought a lot more than this at one time. 

The benefit of not going through the gate is that there are fewer corpses against the walls on this side, all of them piled high at the north and south sides of the building. A few litter the sidewalk, where they were thrown off of the upper floor balconies. More a tripping hazard than a mass of rotting flesh they’ll have to dig through to get to the valve. 

Tyler looks out across the road, almost empty now. The dead will come back, if they start making noise, but it’s as bare as he’s seen it since all this started. He catches Jamie’s sleeve, and they look out together.

“We should go across. Once Alfonse fixes the pipe. After this much work, we might as well take advantage of it. You and me. Quiet and quick.”

“Not tonight,” Jamie says, and Tyler clenches his fists, frustrated. 

“One problem at a time. Hopefully we’ll deal with this without stirring them up too bad. We can’t go over there in the dark. We’re not risking getting caught out overnight. We can’t be where we can’t see them, but they can find us.”

Tyler wishes that didn’t make sense. Wishes he could argue it. He blows out a breath. 

“Tomorrow,” he says, wanting to hear a promise he knows isn’t going to come. 

“We’ll see how it looks in the morning,” Jamie says, and Tyler nods. One problem at a time.

==========

Jamie looks down the ladder, a steep forty-five degree angle over the holly bushes that is more walking down really narrow stairs than climbing down a proper ladder. He takes a deep breath. Checks the street for unpleasant surprises again. Nothing but the few stragglers slowly stumbling their way. 

“Okay,” he says, looking back at his people, Tom, Loui, Nikki and Tyler all ready with weapons, Alfonse loaded down with his tools. “We’re going to do this smart and quick. If we have to fall back and try again, we do that.” 

The shitty part of Tyler’s plan to use the ladder to get over the bushes and balcony is that it’s going to be an awkward climb up, people moving one at a time up the ladder, into the arms of Dion and Ofelia there to help them off. 

Jamie takes one last breath. “Nobody dies,” he says, like it’s something he can order. Something he can command and have it happen. 

He is the first one down the ladder. He looks across, and he can see why Tyler is so eager to get to the store now, sitting there like a red, candy-like button, ready to be pushed. 

Three of the blighted are on the sidewalk and he swipes one down, hears Tyler behind him getting the other ones. 

“I am too fucking old for this shit,” Alfonse complains, coming down the sloping ladder, Nikki dropping his tool bag down to him.

Alfonse shoulders his bag and keeps close to the wall, looking for one of the valves. Tom and Loui come down, fan out, start picking the dead off as they trudge closer. 

Jamie steps out of the group to meet the next blighted, Tyler at his side. He glances at Alfonse, sees him kneeling by the wall. 

“Jamie,” Tyler says, and Jamie knocks clawed hands away and then finishes one of the dead. 

“What?” Jamie asks, because it didn’t sound like a warning. 

Tyler nods across the street, the grocery store just sitting there. “As soon as Alfonse gets the pipe open, I’m going to take the pry-bar. Run over there and just check if it’s locked.”

“No,” Jamie says. “Not happening.”

“We need to know,” Tyler argues, smashes a skull and waits for the next dead to get to them. “We need to know if it’s going to be a problem getting in. No sense waiting until tomorrow just to not be able to get in.”

There’s a sharp tak-tak-tak noise as Alfonse taps the wrench down onto the center of the cap, onto the raised square there that’ll let him get a grip on it. The blighted turn towards the noise, and Nikki steps in behind Alfonse’s back, ready to keep him safe if any of them slip past the guys. 

Jamie moves between two parked cars, Tyler going up over a hood so he can keep close without crowding Jamie’s swing. They sweep a wider perimeter, almost to the opposite sidewalk. Jamie looks, and the grocery store door looks closed to him—he has no idea if it’s locked or not. 

“Watch your feet,” Alfonse calls to Nikki as Tyler and Jamie come back that way. He hits the end of the wrench with the hammer, spinning the cap of the clean-out valve and it comes loose, brown sludge gushing into the street, the pressure of all those tubs overflowing with water behind it. 

Jamie jogs back their way, and Tyler slips in, grabs the pry-bar from Alfonse’s pile of tools. 

“We get them back safe first,” Jamie says, and he isn’t sure if Tyler would listen if Jamie told him not to go at all.

Jamie grabs Alfonse’s bag of tools once he’s repacked it. Alfonse climbs to his feet, his bad leg stiff and awkward from being on the ground. Nikki helps him up, and then he seems to move okay so she steps back where she can help with the thicker stream of dead coming after them. 

“We’re done!” Jamie calls to Tom and Loui, and they start backing up towards the ladder. 

He misses the moment when Alfonse goes down, stepping between a cluster of corpses, bodies they threw off of the upper floors, threw down onto the blighted below. For a second, he can’t even figure out why Alfonse is falling, can’t figure out what is wrong with him.

Alfonse hits with a muffled “Shit!” and tries to get to his feet again. One of the dead clutches his leg, its lower half hidden underneath two others. They must have buried it by accident, throwing corpses off of the upper floors. It pulls Alfonse’s leg, trying to drag itself up, trying to pull him back to its mouth.

Alfonse’s voice turns frantic then, as Jamie rushes to him. “Shit! Get it off! Get it off of me!” 

The thing pulls Alfonse’s leg to its mouth, hissing raggedly, bites down. 

“Son of a bitch!” Tyler curses, and Jamie is closest, smashes its head.

Alfonse stares down at the ruined skull, at the tear in his pants.

“Come on,” Jamie says, trying to act calm and in control even as he’s sick with sorrow, with failure, with the horrible weight of what’s to come. He grabs Alfonse and pulls him to his feet, and beside him, Tyler uses the pry-bar to take down another blighted thing. 

They send Alfonse up the ladder first. “He’s bit!” Jamie calls up to Dion and Ofelia. Nikki goes up, right on Alfonse’s heels, Tom and Loui.

“I’m good!” Alfonse argues back, and nobody is good after they’re bit. Nobody lives through it without getting sick. 

Jamie turns to find Tyler, to tell him _Sorry, but we’re looking at the store tomorrow_ but Tyler is already at the foot of the ladder, one sneaker on the bottom rung. 

“Come on!” he calls, and more of the dead are coming around the snarls of traffic, too many to fight, too many to stand against. 

“Right behind you,” Jamie says, and smacks two dead guys, gets to the ladder. Okay, fighting and climbing at the same time? Terrible idea. Just terrible. The slope of the ladder is so low that it’s more like a three-limbed crawl, swinging wild behind him to keep the dead from grabbing him. The bag of tools shifts on his shoulder and nearly unbalances him.

The ladder shudders as Tyler jumps to the side, grabs onto the balcony railing and pulls himself up, well out of reach of the blighted.

“Hold on!” Loui shouts, and then the entire ladder is moving up, five people pulling Jamie’s weight up. He catches his balance with is weapon-hand, braces himself as he’s pulled past Tyler’s shocked face.

The stabilizing feet of the ladder catch on the edge of the rail and Jamie bangs his knees and chin as he gets slammed forward by the change in momentum. The tool bag strap leaves a burn across the side of his neck. But he’s alive. Alive, and that’s more than he can say for all of them. 

“Alfonse…” Nikki says, trying to take his hand. 

He shakes her off, jaw set and angry. 

“Get off me, girl. I ain’t hurt. I ain’t bit!”

Jamie untangles himself from the ladder and gets to his feet. He knows what he saw, the dead guy holding Alfonse’s leg, the bulge of jaw muscles as it bit down, the tear in Alfonse’s pants. 

“Alfonse…” he says, soft and low and so fucking sorry. 

“I ain’t bit!” he says again, yanks his pants leg up, and Jamie stares. 

The leg under the fabric is shiny-smooth, the fake peach color of waterproof bandaids and plastic doll skin. 

Alfonse taps on it, a hard hollow sound, and shrugs Dion off of his shoulder. 

“Oh,” Tyler says, dumb. He’s still on the wrong side of the balcony, his feet on the bottom cross-bar of the railing, hands on the top. “Oh, holy shit you fucking scared us.”

Jamie reaches back and grabs Tyler’s arm, makes sure he doesn’t fall to his death getting back into the apartment. The dead are gathering around, pushing in on each other, but they haven’t started to pile up yet. 

“Let’s get in, quit giving them something to come after,” Eduardo says, and they move the refrigerator back into place in front of the doors. Loui keeps watch, makes sure the blighted lose interest once the tasty living are out of sight. They’ve got a distraction ready to go just in case.

Jamie glances at Tyler, tries to read his face and fails.

“We’ll try again tomorrow. To get into the store,” he says, trying to guess what Tyler wants to hear.

Tyler shakes his head. “No. I mean, yeah, we have to, but. It’s okay we didn’t today. It’s fine. It’s. Nobody died. That’s what’s important, right?”

He bumps into Jamie’s side, and they both sway, adrenalin crashing, shaky in the aftermath of such a near miss. 

“Yeah,” Jamie says. “Nobody died.” He can’t quite figure out how they got so damn lucky, a coin toss if the dead grabbed Alfonse’s good leg or the plastic one.


	24. Chapter 24

They wake late the next morning to heavy, dreary skies, and Tyler knows they aren’t going out. There’s a bite to the air, a humid chill that makes his ears ache even as he sweats as he helps move refrigerators to the garage, trying to beat the rain. Jamie is pale, his cheeks blotchy red as they get the brushed steel water-holder up on a pair of desk chairs, wrestle them over the threshold of an apartment door. 

“You look like shit,” Alfonse says when they get out to the garage, maneuver their load into place with Loui’s help. “You sure you ain’t bit?” He says it with a touch of teasing, a little bit of _fuck you buddy_. 

Jamie shakes his head. “I’m okay.” 

Alfonse watches him for another moment, and then goes on with his work, trying to get a piece of aluminum gutter fitted into the gap the water will come down

The sky opens up close to noon, according to the battery-powered clock in the kitchen. They aren’t ready, but they catch what they can gushing out of the cut in the pipe, trying to direct it into the refrigerators. It’s sloppy work, wet and cold, constant splashing that soaks them to the skin. 

Tyler is shaking when the rain slows to a drizzle. 

“We ain’t gettin’ much more today,” Alfonse says, frustrated with the little they caught. As erratic as Dallas gets rain, they need at least a month’s water at a time, and they didn’t get near that in this storm. There was too much splash, too much overflow, too much water running down the sloped floor of the garage, wasted.

They go in, defeated, and Jamie is absolutely not-okay, feverish and trembling. Tyler gets him naked and dried off and then wrapped in as many blankets as he can put around him. There’s no hot anything. Not water or anything to drink.

“Put him in bed,” Kara tells him, “And you get in there with him. Warm him up.”

There are worse things than snuggling Jamie in the middle of the day, but Tyler sure as hell wishes the circumstances were different. He strips down to his boxers and climbs in. Kara puts another blanket over them, goes and gets a toque to put over Jamie’s wet hair.

“I’m okay,” Jamie tries to tell him.

Tyler scoffs. “Sure you are.” 

 

=============

Tyler lies with Jamie until Jamie is warm and Tyler can’t deal with the boredom anymore. There’s hammering coming from the master bedroom, or the apartment past the master bedroom, where Loui is nailing a door to the hole in the closet wall. 

Tyler helps out moving all of Jamie’s old stuff out of the closet and carries a new mattress in there. Dion starts working on the lights that’ll warm the place up some for Mikaela and the kids. They nail a quilt over the hole in the wall to stop drafts from coming in around the gaps, and then they hang a sheet horizontally over the space at waist-height to keep the warm air from rising and being wasted. 

“Here,” Eduardo says, and passes in one of the smoke detectors they’d pulled down for the battery. Tyler gets a hammer and nail and hangs it just under the fabric ‘roof’. 

=============

Jamie is sick. He can’t deny it. There’s just so much that needs to be done. They can’t afford to have one of their strongest guys scratched. 

Kara keeps bringing him gross red stuff in a little plastic cup though, and he sleeps. Wakes up and Ofelia has water for him, another plastic cup. It gets dark, and Tyler slips into bed with him again, a plastic cup in hand, and Jamie drinks, grimacing at the thick medicinal flavor of it. 

He huddles in against Tyler’s body, so warm and lean. “You shouldn’t get sick too,” he says, but he can’t find the willpower to pull away.

============

It rains a second day, and they make a better catch on the water, get a little less than completely soaked this time. 

“We’re going to need more bleach,” Alfonse says. Even at a couple teaspoons per container, they’ll run out of it before they get a sustainable clean water source. 

“I’ll see what I can find when we hit the store,” Tyler promises. That’s…not something he can do right now, not alone. Not until the rain stops and Jamie is strong enough to go with him. When they stop for lunch, he looks out the window of Jamie’s apartment. He can’t see the store from there, but the dead below are worked up, a seething mass of hunger, trying to find what’s making that noise and eat it.

==========

Jamie wakes up alone, thin yellow light coming in the windows. The bed he’s laying on is the only one left in the room, a cup of water and a bottle of the red stuff beside him. He drinks the water but leaves the other 

He feels…better. Light-headed and hungry, but not freezing cold anymore, not burning with fever. He wraps a blanket around his shoulder and slips his feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers by his mattress. He tucks the empty cup under his arm and pushes himself up with his free hand.

The world shifts around as he stands up, and he puts a hand to the wall to steady himself. 

He’s still thirsty, so he heads for the bathroom, turns the knob and stares down at the nothing that comes out of the tap. So that’s changed while he was too fucked up to know about it. He goes back to the bedroom and stands for a long moment, listening, trying to figure where everyone has gone. His bat (not the one he gave Tyler, one he found later, in a closet with softball equipment) is by the door so he takes it in one hand, holds his blanket around his shoulders with the other. He goes through the hole in the wall, through the bedroom the women were sleeping in. Half the mattresses and pillows are gone from there too. 

The dogs are in that apartment’s living room, and he stops to give pets. “Where is everybody?” he asks them, but they just jump up on him and nuzzle under his hands and lick his fingers. 

He goes through the closet and into a bedroom piled high with blankets and pillows, sheets and towels. The next apartment is quiet too, full of tables and shelves from all over. Kara and Ofelia have used a dining table with a coffee table on top of it, end tables on top of those, to use all the vertical space possible.

Under the table are plastic crates labeled “flour etc,” “baking misc,” “Pasta Rice Beans.”

Neat rows of cooking oil fill this apartment’s kitchen counters. The appliances are gone and more shelves in their places, one of peanut butter, one jelly, one the maple flavored corn syrup they eat down here. The back wall of one counter is covered with cans on their sides stacked to the underside of the cabinet, the ends labeled with a weird code to show what’s in them at a glance. 

Rolls of toilet paper make a tower in one corner, as high as a short-person can reach. Four bookcases are along another wall. 

Jamie was never really excited about school, but he remembers a presentation, one day in May. There had been a series of photos, from one of the concentration camps, from the Holocaust. A mountain of suitcases. A room full of shoes. A pile of so many eyeglasses that he couldn’t even figure out what they were at first. Each item a life lost, a person dead. 

One of the shelves here has toothpaste. Packed and stuffed to the bottom of the next shelf, some in their boxes, others squished and almost empty. Above it is toothbrushes, some of them still packed, the used ones in a big jar of purple fluid. Mouthwash. Deodorant. Dental floss. Shaving supplies. On another bookcase, a shelf of Ibuprofen. Two shelves of first aid. Bandaids. Peroxide. Too little. Not nearly enough, and the grocery store sure to be cleaned out.

Through the other open bedroom door he can see stacks of boxes, clothes and shoes. Things they’ll need. Things their owners will never need again.

This is what it looks like. The way the end of the world looks in one small building in one city. His mind can’t take it in, how many shoes, how many baseball hats there are now that’ll never be worn again. He remembers rush hour traffic and thinks _how many coffee cups? How many keychains? How many cell phones?_

He’s tired, and he sits down in the middle of the floor. 

Kate is the one to find him there. Comes in with a box of mixed items. She freezes for just a second as she comes in, but then moves again. 

He looks up, and she puts the box on the island, steps over and kneels next to him, puts her head on his shoulder. 

“You see,” she says, and he nods. Doesn’t know how to deal with the loss, with the enormity of it all. 

They stay there until Kara comes looking for Kate. She takes one look and comes back with Tyler.

“Jamie?” Tyler’s voice is soft, and he walks slow and careful to Jamie, crouches down next to Kate. “You guys okay?” he asks, and Jamie nods.

“I. Yeah. I woke up and you were gone.”

Tyler nods, reaches out to put the back of his hand on Jamie’s forehead. “We’re still moving stuff. Still organizing.” His hand moves to Jamie’s cheek, and he looks relieved. “You’re feeling cooler.”

Jamie swallows. Wishes he’d found another water. “Did you go already? To the store?”

Tyler shakes his head, lowers his eyes like he feels bad, guilty. “No, I. They needed a go-between. Inside team and outside, the people I brought and yours. Keeping it all on track.”

Jamie isn’t sure if he’s more proud of Tyler for picking up his slack or relieved that he hasn’t been outside. “Oh. That’s good,” he says, to both. 

Kara talks soft to Kate and offers her a hand. Kate hugs Jamie’s shoulders and then takes it. 

“You okay?” Tyler asks, cocking his head, frowning like he’s trying to see past Jamie’s physical condition to figure out what he’s feeling. 

Jamie shakes his head, gestures around. “It’s…”

“A lot,” Tyler finishes when Jamie can’t find the words. He reaches down and takes Jamie’s arm, and together they get Jamie back on his feet. 

“Come on. Let’s go back home, get you something to drink. Eduardo is working on the solar ovens. There might be warm soup later if the sun cooperates.”

It doesn’t seem fair. Doesn’t seem right to go and let himself be taken care of, when so many are beyond that slight mercy. 

Jamie can’t find the strength to resist Tyler’s gentle hand, his worried eyes.

He goes, back through to his old apartment. Lets Tyler lead him back to his mattress, lets him put a glass of clean water in Jamie’s hand. 

“I get it,” Tyler says, while Jamie drinks. “It comes and goes, but we all get it. We all feel it. That room. I know it would be dumb to not organize stuff, but. Yeah. It’s a lot.”

“I don’t understand,” Jamie admits. “How we got so lucky. Why we’re alive when…”

Tyler shrugs. “Who the fuck knows. But. This is a good place. You get that, right? Us? Everybody? It’s. We’re making something good.” 

Jamie nods. It’s not a hard thing to believe. 

“All we can do is keep going,” Tyler says, sits down next to Jamie and rests their shoulders together. 

Jamie can’t think of it as honoring the dead or some sentimental bullshit like that, but. Quitting sure as hell won’t bring anybody back. Won’t make the world whole again.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and Tyler quirks a smile at him.

“Tomorrow,” Tyler says, firm. “At the earliest. For now, you’re going to stay in bed the rest of the day. If you could see how pale you are right now…”

Jamie doesn’t feel exactly sick anymore, but even his short walk has worn him out. 

“Tomorrow,” he says. 

Tyler eases him down onto their bed and covers him up.

“I’ll wake you up with soup later. I hope. You need anything else?”

Jamie shakes his head, his eyes already closing. 

Tomorrow he’ll be stronger. Strong enough to at least fake being well enough to work. 

There’s still so much left to do.

==============


	25. Chapter 25

Jamie stands on the chair they’re using to get over the railing and onto the ladder. The moment disorients him for a second, deja-vu of the last time he was here, ready to go out of their shelter. He tells himself it’s just him and Tyler this time, nobody slow to protect. They can do this. They’re good at this. 

The wind whips down the street, cold and biting his face. He’s not sure the heavy jackets were the best idea. Too padded, too encumbering. 

Further down the building, a shower of electronics equipment starts to fall. The dead on the street turn at the noise, but slower than they did last time, and Jamie is worried they’re just smart enough to learn, to wait until there’s something actually alive before they bother moving. They shuffle, slow, but reach for the flutter of the plastic bags that come next. Maybe they aren’t becoming jaded. Maybe they’re getting old, worn out. How long can a dead thing possibly keep moving?

“Remember how I told you?” Alfonse asks, and Jamie nods. He’s got the tools on him, the two power drills they found and charged before the power went out. Screwdriver, hammer, awl, WD-40. Pry-bar in case it’s barricaded somehow instead of actually locked.

“You call it,” Tyler says from behind him, and Jamie can’t stall anymore.

“Okay,” Jamie says. “Careful on the ladder down.”

“I’m always careful,” Tyler says, and he’s so not always-careful that it’s a joke. Jamie grits his teeth and starts to move down the ladder, one sure step at a time. He clears the landing-spot on the sidewalk and hears Tyler behind him. 

The plan is to go straight across with as little interruption as possible. To let the others continue the distraction. They move together, quick and confident, dodging around the slow-moving blighted, taking them down just because it’s so fucking easy. 

They have to be more careful as they get to the parking lot, through the jumble of cars and shopping carts. The front of the store is at right angles to the front of the apartment and they swing wide so they can see before they get up on it.

Tyler’s empty backpack flops on his back. There are a few things they need to grab if they see it (diapers, a water hose that’s longer than the washing-machine ones, store walkie-talkies if they can find them). Tom had said Nikki was pouting that the building full of yuppies didn’t have enough decent cereal, and if they find anything fruity-sweet to grab a box. Jamie thinks the guy is a little ambitious there, but maybe the last-single-man-in-Dallas bump is about as effective as the Hey-I-play-in-the-NHL bump.

They get to the front door, a dead-end culdasack. There are two sets of sliding doors. The motion sensors are as dead as the electricity. Tyler swipes one of the blighted off of its feet and then smashes its skull while Jamie slots the end of the pry bar into the crease, tries to work it open if it’s just deactivated. He pushes, and nothing. No give at all. Okay, disappointing, but not surprising.

“Yours!” he calls, and drops the tool bag in front of the door. Tyler switches with him. The scattering of dead are about split evenly, one half falling for the diversion, the closer ones starting to file towards the storefront. The last time he was out here, it would have been a problem, but they’re so impaired now that it’s not hard to step up, to get to them before they get to Tyler. 

He hears the sharp tap-tap of Tyler hammering a hole into the lock-face with the awl, right where Alfonse said to put it, just above the key-hole. The first drill has the eighth-inch bit, and Tyler starts to drill while Jamie keeps him safe. He’d had a vague thought, of filling another cart as they were running through, but there will be such a thick carpet of corpses by the time they’re done that they’ll never get it over them. 

The drill’s motor whines and then suddenly spins unimpaired and Tyler shuts it off. 

“Your turn,” he says and takes up his bat. Jamie slips the jacket off of his shoulders, too hot from the exertion to deal with its stifling bulk. 

Jamie has more weight behind him. Even after being sick, he’s still the stronger of the two. He needs both weight and strength when he switches to the drill with the quarter-inch bit, widening the hole Tyler made, drilling out and destroying all the tumblers. 

“Jamie!” Tyler says, over the grind of the drill, and Jamie turns to look. 

“Hold up a sec,” Tyler says, looking towards the corner of the store that’s furthest from the apartments. “I thought I saw…” he takes a few steps that way, and Jamie is so close to getting this lock open. He glances and doesn’t see any dead close enough to worry about. He pulls the switch, leans into the back of the drill. 

He glances over his shoulder, but that changes the angle and the power tool makes an unhappy noise. The bit keeps chewing into the metal, hungry, so fucking close. 

“Jame!” Tyler shouts. A shadow moves in the reflection on the dirty glass. Jamie jerks to the side. One of the blighted is stumbling in, a huge guy that’s as tall as Jamie and twice his weight. He’s half to his feet when it falls on him, and he jabs the drill at its face, squeezes the switch. 

Black blood and brains mist his face and Jamie twists to the side, hitting the ground hard with all that weight on top of him. The drill bit grinds against the sidewalk, not caring what it’s running against. 

“Shit shit shit!” Tyler says, tries to get the guy off of Jamie.

“Look out!” Jamie says, and Tyler stops while he beats back the approaching blighted. Their slow movements don’t seem as easy now. Inexorable like a slow flow of lava coming down a mountain.

Tyler gets the area controlled for enough time to come back to Jamie, and with the two of them working together they get the corpse off of him. Jamie picks up his weapon, hopes he got deep enough into the lock because the drill is fucked. He pistol-whips the next dead with it, throws it away when the battery pack breaks off. 

Tyler gets the flat-head screwdriver and hammers it into the key-slot. Almost done. Jamie grabs the pry-bar again, ready to give the push when the lock opens.

Tyler grabs the screwdriver with both hands and turns it like a key. There’s a sharp snap noise, and Jamie has a second of terror that they fucked it up, that the screwdriver just broke off in the lock, and then Tyler is saying “Got it! We got it! Go!”

Jamie hits the bar sideways with his weight and the doors slide open a little more than a foot. Tyler slips the pack off of his shoulder and slides through, pushes one door while Jamie shoves the other until they’ve got it open enough for Jamie to get through. 

Jamie falls in, panting, and Tyler is already on the other end of the sliding glass, shoving it closed again. Jamie takes the other one and they get it closed before the dead start to thump against it, walking into the dirty glass and bouncing off. 

“Holy shit,” Tyler whispers, and Jamie looks around them.

The store is trashed, bodies rotting in the aisles, some shelves empty and knocked over, others still cluttered with bottles or jars. The lighting is dim, the stench of decay almost overwhelming. 

“Let’s get through this and get the hell out,” Jamie decides. Tyler nods, picks up his pack and his bat. They start on one side, floral and bakery. There is a display of mummified mums, dried out in their flower pots, ready for the American Thanksgiving that never happened. The dirt will be worth having, if they can figure out how to not fight to get over here again. If they can figure out how to get more per trip than what Jamie and Tyler can carry. 

The bakery is a waste, most of the food gone, the few clear packages that fell on the floor and were overlooked green with mold inside. The actual cooking area though, there are five-gallon tubs of raw ingredients— flour, sugar, oils. They’ll have to come back for those if they can figure out how to cook them.

Produce has some potential. Onions and some runty potatoes on the floor, kicked into corners. Everything else is a rotted wet mess. Dairy reeks, and even if some of the cheese would be edible, Jamie can’t imagine eating anything that came from that. 

Tyler turns the corner into the next aisle, just beyond the range of Jamie’s swing. 

Something flashes out, faster than Jamie can see it, and Tyler is struck back, falls to the ground on his side, hands on his throat and choking, coughing, gasping.

“I said you have to pay for that!” a man’s voice shouts, and Jamie turns the corner. 

The guy is not-okay, filthy and wide-eyed. The left leg of his khaki pants is stained dark from mid-thigh down, a tight belt cutting in deep just above it. He’s got a thick pole, like an industrial mop-handle, held like a weapon. His name-tag reads _Mr. Harker, Asst. Mgr._

“This shrinkage is coming out of your bonus!” the guy yells, and he swings the pole down. Jamie raises the bat to block it and the force of the blow rattles down his arm, leaves his hand numb.

“Stop, stop,” he says, and Tyler rolls on the floor, writhing. “We’re sorry! We didn’t know anybody was here! We’ll go!”

“No! Unauthorized! Breaks!” Harker shouts and swings again. Jamie deflects this one instead of trying to stop it. Knocks the pole wide and steps in. Grabs it with one hand. The guy reeks, smells of rot and Lysol bad enough that Jamie gags. 

The bat comes down, and even with only one hand on the grip, Jamie is strong and terrified, riding high on adrenaline. Harker’s skull crushes down, a divot that distorts his head down to his eyes. 

The store is quiet then, except for Tyler’s ragged choking, except for the thumps of the dead coming against the glass doors up front. 

“Shit!” Jamie says and drops the pole, scrambles to Tyler’s side and goes to his knees, lifting Tyler into his arms. “Shit, breathe!” he begs, looking into Tyler’s wide eyes.

Like Jamie’s words made the impossible happen, Tyler draws in a breath, wheezing and raw, but he gets it in. Jamie pulls his hands away and there’s a red mark just under his Adam’s apple, already turning purple. The weapon was dull at least. Didn’t break the skin. Didn’t hit quite hard enough to crush his windpipe. _He’s just shocked,_ Jamie tries to tell himself. Knows it’s better than it could be but Tyler still needs ice, needs medicine, needs something to keep it from swelling up.

“Stay here,” Jamie tells him, and it breaks his heart to untangle Tyler’s fingers from his shirt, to leave him there. He runs, looking for the pharmacy, the over-the-counter medicines. He almost doesn’t recognize it, it’s so decimated. 

“Bottom shelves,” he repeats Eduardo’s advice. “Things out of sight, things pushed back from the edge.” He grabs three different bottles and discards them, and then he sees the box with the little purple-grape symbol on it. Takes the time to read that it is actually what he’s looking for and then runs back to Tyler’s side. 

“It’s all they had,” he says as he slides in to cradle Tyler’s shoulders again. His hands fumble as he opens the box and takes out the little bottle of children’s Ibuprofen. He can’t bother to read the label, but he doesn’t think it’ll kill Tyler to have a little too much just this once. He pours a careful dose in the cup it comes with, holds it to Tyler’s lips and watches him drink. 

Tyler’s lips move and Jamie shakes his head as he pours a second. “Don’t try to talk. Jesus Christ you scared me to fucking death.” He knows it’s not Tyler’s fault. Knows Harker could have got either of them by surprise like that. Still. Tyler is here and alive and Jamie fusses at him just because he can. 

Jamie isn’t sure how long they sit there, Tyler’s shoulders in his lap, Jamie counting his breaths, assessing if each one is stronger or weaker than the one before. 

Tyler finally taps Jamie’s elbow, and Jamie lets him up. He sits up, his head held at a weird angle to keep the pressure off of the injury. 

“I’m okay,” Tyler says. He sounds hoarse, but the words are clear enough. “We gotta finish…” 

“No,” Jamie says. “We’ll get you back, and if Tom and Nikki will come with me, we’ll come back.

Tyler shakes his head, puts one hand and one knee on the floor and pushes up from the other foot, stands there for a moment evaluating his damage. “That’s dumb,” Tyler says. “There’s nothing to do for me there that you haven’t done already.” 

“Damn it, fine, just stop talking already,” Jamie sighs. Stubborn fucker. Tyler bends over and takes the pole that jabbed his throat, uses it for a walking stick. 

Jamie takes the lead now, up and down the aisles. Some are swept clean. No beer or wine, no canned goods. Plenty of ketchup. The salad dressing shelves look almost untouched. They find a dozen cans and jars of olives, far enough from the rest of the cans that they were overlooked. Jamie puts the cans in his bag, leaves the glass jars to come get later, when they won’t get broken. 

The breakfast goods are pretty picked through, but Tyler fishes in the recesses of the bottom shelf with the pole and finds a couple boxes of cereal, dumps them in his bag. 

The babies and pets aisle is messy but not empty, and Jamie keeps watch while Tyler fills his bag with diapers that might not fit, the smallest ones he can find. They leave the baby food, the infant shampoo, take some diaper rash stuff, grabbing tubes and boxes at random. 

They get through to the other side, back where Jamie found the kid’s ibuprofen. The pharmacy gate is closed, locked to the counter. They don’t have another drill charged, but maybe, if they bring enough brute force, they can fuck it up enough to get in. 

“Registers next, or back room?” Tyler asks. It’s darker on this side, the light coming in the front windows far away, the translucent skylights few and far between. Jamie thinks Tyler looks pale, hurting. 

Jamie considers. With that guy running around in here, he doubts there are any dead left. “Back, I guess.”

They walk side by side, along the back wall, looking for the door to the ‘employees only’ area. Halfway there, Tyler jerks his head to the side. Jamie follows his gaze. In the meat department, there’s a black water hose, rolled up and hanging on the wall. That’s two things off of their list. Jamie hops the counter and gets it down. 

“Good eye,” he says when he comes back with it in his bag. A thought occurs to him. “When we were outside and you told me to wait. What did you see?”

“Kids,” Tyler says. “I thought…” he shrugs. “They must have been dead. But for a second, I thought they were looking at us.”

Jamie shudders. Kids are the worst, their little dead bodies so light, their skulls so small. 

They get to the back room, but it’s too dark back there, too many boxes and shelves. “No way we’re finding anything useful in the dark,” he decides, and for once Tyler isn’t a little shit about it. 

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Back up front. We’ll see if there’s anything at the registers and then get back. The others will be worried.”

It takes them longer to search the registers than any other part of the store. There’s just such a mess behind them, and Jamie doesn’t want to miss it if there’s a walkie-talkie there. They each start at an end and work through to the middle. He picks up a few chocolate bars, a bag of Cheetos. Little treats for the Akshaya and Darius. They meet up, and Tyler shrugs. 

“Can’t win them all.”

Jamie sighs and nods. Okay. Shit. Now they just have to fight their way out. Or he has to. Tyler will be doing good if he can keep on his feet and move faster than a walk. Now that they’re where the light’s better, Tyler is looking kind of pale. 

They’ve done this enough times that they don’t need words. Tyler taking up a spot where he can jab the pole out as soon as there is a gap, Jamie getting the pry bar into the place to make a gap. 

They go out fighting, Tyler taking down three of them from range, giving Jamie room to open the doors and then spill out swinging. He holds the pack of tools like a shield, pushing the dead back while he swings on them. 

The blighted seem to have found some of their energy, moving more like they had when they were fresher. Faster is relative though, and Jamie smacks them down, breaks arms and then skulls, cleans out the doorway. Tyler jabs a few more and then there’s enough time to close the door behind them, pulling it to within a hand’s width of shut, leaving it easier to get into next time. 

A couple more blighted come up and are dealt with, and then Jamie looks across the road, at few dead between him and there. Tom and Loui and Nikki are armed up, running a divert-and-smash operation on the sidewalk, piling up the bodies. Eduardo, on the balcony, makes eye contact with Jamie and Jamie raises his hand in a thumb’s up to show that they’re okay. 

“Jamie,” Tyler says, soft, and Jamie turns. 

_So they weren’t dead after all,_ Jamie thinks. There are two kids, a small one of indeterminable gender, probably about Darius’ age, a taller one with long strands of blond hair escaping her hoodie. Tyler reaches and squeezes Jamie’s fingers, once, and pulls Jamie a little behind him. Jamie is happy to cede this job to Tyler. 

“Hi there,” Tyler says, nodding towards them. They don’t move, don’t blink. The tall one’s blue eyes are dull, gray shadows around them. “Hey. You guys okay? You need somewhere to go? We live in that building over there. We’ve got food and clean water. A warm place to sleep. There’s kids. Darius is nine, and Akshaya is like four?”

The taller one shifts her weight, a flash of shiny metal in her hand, a small short blade. 

Tyler takes a step backwards, his bag bumping Jamie’s chest. Jamie makes sure they still have the room to be doing this, but none of the blighted are close enough to worry them yet. 

The kids take a step back and then another. Tyler reaches into his bag and grabs one of the boxes of cereal. Puts it down by his feet. 

“Hey, you don’t have to decide today. Here, this is for you. You come get it when we’re gone.” 

One of the dead follows Tyler’s voice in, and Jamie has to take his eyes off the kids to put it down.

When he looks back, they’re gone.

===========


	26. Chapter 26

Tyler is benched, his neck stiff and sore from the whiplash of the hit he took, the front of his throat bruised black, the soft tissue puffy even with the ibuprofen he’s taking. Jamie thought he’d put up a fuss. Thought he’d argue and insist on working. It worries him, how little Tyler fights the order to rest. 

It’s been warmer for three days, and the dead seem to have recovered from their cold-borne lethargy. Tyler’s spent the time wrapped up in a blanket, sitting on the floor by one of the store-facing balconies. Jamie finds him there, a beer bottle half-empty beside him. They’re saving the hard liquor for water-purification and first-aid if they need it for that later, but Kara is doling out the light stuff one bottle at a time.

Tyler glances up at him, and then his gaze goes back across the street to the store.

“Have you seen them?” Jamie asks as he sits down beside Tyler, as he steals a sip of his beer.

Tyler shakes his head. “I think they took the cereal. It’s all such a fucking mess down there I’m not sure.” 

Jamie looks down. If the store parking lot was clean, if there weren’t bodies piled up and trash blowing in, maybe they’d be able to see the yellow box from here. 

“I’m sure they took it,” Jamie tells him. Hopes it’s true. “Did you see them? They were cold. Hungry.”

Tyler bites his lip. If he hadn’t been hurting, Jamie is sure he’d have gone after them when they rabbited. Would probably have got cut for his trouble, if Jamie wasn’t fast enough to stop him. 

“Did you see her box cutter?” Tyler asks. He wants to sigh. “That’s not a blade to fight the dead with. She’s more scared of people than them.” That’s saying something in times like these.

He looks again, and still can’t tell the cereal box from the other clutter.

“If we see them again, let me talk to them. Eduardo, if I’m somewhere else.”

“No problem,” Jamie agrees. “That’s all you guys.”

============

Tyler gets better. Starts working half-days and then full-days with the others. 

The weather gets colder and the dead get slower. They start each day with a walk around the block, smashing every slush-for-brains fuck-head they find. Pile the bodies in the street like autumn leaves raked into convenient piles. Dallas weather can be a moody asshole, and the slow won’t stay slow if the weather turns warm without warning. The more they can eliminate now, the better. They take two days, clear the garage and the complex’s offices. 

With Tom and Loui and Nikki helping, they clear a zig-zagging path from the store to the north gate, through the snarled and battered cars. The cars that they can start, or at least put into neutral, they move to broaden the path, to wall off the dead from getting at the path from gate to store.

They pull a bathroom door off it’s hinges and use it as a bridge over the open sewer that runs down the gutter. Then they can go back through the store, grabbing everything that’s useful—the flower pots full of dirt, powdered milk, coffee and tea. Diapers, toilet paper, feminine hygiene. Cooking oil, the first-aid case from behind one of the registers, everything in a can or jar. They fill cart after cart and bring it across the street to the ground floor, lining the carts up until they can bring them all the way up the next time the weather turns on them.

Tyler leaves little gifts for his strays. A can of corn with a pull-top, a box of the women’s pads, a bag of mints. Leaves them in the same place he put the cereal down. Once, he’s watching from the balcony across the parking garage from Jamie’s place while he eats dinner and sees them in the fading light, scurrying out of the shadows and grabbing the grocery bag he left them (flashlight, dry socks, cans of soda). 

Dion rigs up a car battery and a pair of headlights onto a shopping cart and they use that to see what the hell they’re doing in the back room. There are a lot of boxes there, a lot of stuff to go through. It looks like a shelf fell over, and they have to clear that out of the way before they can be more selective about what they take. 

Tyler looks at the fallen shelves, the way they pop together, two and a half feet deep, adjustable height, six feet wide, strong enough for cases and cases of cans. He thinks of Jamie’s master bedroom, all of them crowded in there, sleeping on mattresses on the floor to share body heat at night (except Mikaela, Akshaya, Darius and the baby in the closet). There’s no back on the store shelves, just strapping to keep them square. They could anchor them to the wall instead or something, wire them together. Put a bed on the floor and make two platforms above that with as high as the ceilings are in Jamie’s place. Sleep three times as many people in that space, all safe and warm but a little less crowded. They’ll need the extra room, if the kids come in, if they need to put them somewhere sheltered, a little private.

“Hey Jamie, bunk-beds?”

The sound of motorcycles yowl down the streets while they’re moving the shelves, echoing between the buildings, no way to tell where they’re coming from. The whine of the engines fades before the riders come into sight though, before they can drop everything and run. Going a different way, looking for something else. 

There’s something eerie about not being alone in the world again, a month after the end of civilization.

Jamie takes to making short explorations after lunch, and like hell is Tyler going to let him go alone. They take down more of the dead and look for their next objective. Look for more people. They go one block further at a time, if that, knocking on doors and peeking in windows. They check out the Starbucks, and start on the line of brownstones around the corner, keeping in touch with home base with the walkie talkies they found in the store’s back room.

They stay away from the direction the kids ran in. It’s a bad idea to look like they’re hunting them down.

A week after they first break into the grocery store, they go down in the morning and the kids are standing in the street. 

“Uh…” Nikki says.

“Tell Eduardo to get the gun. To cover us in case this is some bullshit,” Tyler says. He scans the parking lot behind them, but doesn’t see anybody living or dead.

Jamie sends Nikki and the guys back in. The less they can expose themselves the better.

Tyler goes out slow to meet them, Jamie backing him up. The kids wear backpacks on over their coats now. The girl has her box-cutter at her side. The smaller one leans into her, like they’re trying to shelter in her warmth. Both the kids look like shit, thinner, more tired than they had last time. 

“Do you still have room for us?” the girl asks, chin up and defiant. She looks younger than Tyler is. A couple of years he thinks—between thirteen and fifteen. 

“Yeah,” he says. Watches her lips press together, her frown deepen. 

She takes a breath. “You can do anything you want to me. Just me. And we both eat. We both get warm.”

He hesitates, possible answers flashing through his head. Trying to figure out what he’d have believed, just a few months ago. “Anything?” 

“Tyler!” Jamie hisses behind him, and Tyler waves him off. 

The girl nods. “Yeah,” she says, angry and bitter. “Yeah, anything. But just me.”

“Leave the blade,” Tyler tells her. “Just put it on the ground there and come on in.”

She huffs and puts it down, and the pairs step a circle around each other, out of reach. 

Tyler bends down and picks up the cutter and they follow the kids in. Tom and Loui guard the entrance and the kids go past them, wary like feral cats. Darius is there just past the gate, and Tyler thanks whoever sent him down for being a freaking genius. 

“Come on, this way,” Darius says and leads them to the stairs. Tyler follows, giving them enough room that they don’t feel herded in. 

Jamie grabs his arm, slows him down even further. 

“Tyler what the fuck?” Jamie hisses. “You know nobody here will…” he can’t even bring himself to say the things they won’t do, and Tyler feels bad for him.

Tyler feels really old and really tired in that moment. When did he become one of the grownups? He sighs, shakes his head.

“Men always want something,” he tells Jamie. “Right now they think I’m a pervert. That’s easier to work with than thinking I’m a _lying_ pervert.”

Jamie looks sick and Tyler would like to smooth this over for him. He can see Jamie guilting himself over this, thinking about the things he wanted when they met, like it’s anything the same. Like Jamie would have ever withheld any of the things he gave Tyler to get something Tyler wasn’t happy to give.

They get upstairs and Kara is waiting in the hall for them. 

Tyler takes a breath and tries to find his bossy voice again. “Kids, this is Kara. Kara, this is…”

“Brittney,” the girl says and then gestures to the little one. “And Jayden.”

“Brittney and Jayden,” Tyler confirms. “Okay guys, this is Kara, and she’s the boss of you now. She’s the only one that’s the boss of you, so if someone else tells you to do something, you get her okay before you do it, got it?”

He shoots Kara an apologetic glance behind the newcomers’ backs, and she looks distinctly unimpressed with him. 

Kara puts her hands on her hips and looks them over. “Okay, first order is to come in and get warm and get fed, then we’ll figure out where you’re going to sleep and what chores you’ll be doing.”

She points and the kids go. 

“Seriously Tyler? You don’t think I have enough to do?”

He shrugs. “They need to be inside, and they need a woman dealing with them. You can pawn them off on Ofelia and Mikaela when they get settled.”

She snorts but waves him off. “Thanks, asshole,” she says, and Tyler feels bad, but she really is the best one to get them used to being inside. He doesn’t think she’ll hold the grudge, but he makes a plan to ask her if she wants anything just for her the next time he goes out.

Just to be sure.

======================

The weather turns warm, three days of sunshine and just-cooler-than t-shirt days outside. They take the time to build the oversize bunkbeds in the master bedroom. Jamie and Tyler sleep a few nights in the old bedroom, using the privacy to spend a little quality time.

(Jamie thinks, maybe it’s better for Brittney and Jayden too. If they think Jamie is the boss and that Tyler wants _that_ from them, having a couple nights without the two of them in the same room has to be a relief). 

The dead seem less nimble to Jamie, as he watches from the open balcony doors--falling more often. Sometimes crawling instead of climbing back up as soon as they hit something to pull up on. It gets him thinking about the rest of the world, places where winter would come harder and earlier than in Dallas. Some parts of Canada, it might have been freezing before the outbreak even started. 

He can’t bring it up in the day, not in front of people who have lost everything and everyone, but he whispers to Tyler in the dark, “Do you think it started in the east, in New York, or was that just where the news picked the story up?” 

Tyler sighs into the night. “Who knows? It could have come from anywhere.”

“Victoria was still okay,” Jamie points out. “When I talked to Jordie, they were okay. It won’t get cold enough there to freeze the blighted out, but. If they can keep the island closed…” They wouldn’t have to keep it closed long. If the rest of Canada can contain the outbreak, can come and help them. There might not be any starvation, any chaos.

“Toronto,” Jamie says. “It gets cold there early, right? It might…”

“It took two days, Jamie. Two days for Dallas to die. I can’t…can’t think about Toronto.”

Jamie nods and holds Tyler and they listen to each other breathe in the long night, the room so quiet after sharing the master bedroom with eleven other people. 

===============

Brittney and Jayden settle in. Kara puts them to work helping her unpack the shopping carts, stacking and sorting the supplies. They need more space, so they clean up and empty out another apartment. Tom and Jamie bring her shelves and tables from the back room of the office downstairs. 

Kara’s “Thanks,” is just to Tom, her smile more than friendly. 

“No problem,” Tom says, and they linger in the hall, his hand on her waist, Jamie shifting his feet awkward, feeling like he shouldn’t be seeing this. 

“I thought you were bringing presents to Nikki,” Jamie says later, as they head down for another load. 

Tom grins. “I was. I am.”

Jamie frowns. The girls are friends. Tom being a flirt with both of them could disrupt the group, could get people angry for no good reason.

Still, he doesn’t think it’s his business to tell people who they can make eyes at. 

“I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,” he says.

“Me too,” Tom laughs. 

“You can’t fuck with them like that,” Jamie warns, and that sobers Tom up.

“I won’t. I’m not.”

Jamie nods. That was a good talk. He’s glad it’s over.

===========

“I forgive you,” Kara says to Tyler, three days after the kids come in. It’s almost dark, and everybody is in, sitting together in the warmest room, drinking cold soup (the cardboard-and-foil solar ovens blew away. They need to go out and get a replacement, some sort of dish-shaped thing that weighs enough it’ll hold together in the roof-top wind. They can’t go until the weather goes cold again). 

“Huh?” Tyler says, wondering what the hell he did now. 

She nods over to the corner, where Brittney has Akshaya in her lap, working the tangles out of the little girl’s hair with a comb. Darius and Jayden are sitting in front of them, Darius carefully reading from a kid’s magazine while Jayden listens attentively. 

“Kids aren’t really my thing,” Kara says, “so I thought it would be a pain in the ass, but she got them settled. Picked up Darius and Akshaya and helps out with Elle sometimes.”

“Good,” Tyler says. If one problem is going to take care of itself, he sure as fuck won’t complain.

===============

There isn’t anything they need bad enough to fight active blighted for, and Tyler tries to keep busy while a few warm days stretch into a week. Ofelia shows him how to soak black-eyed-peas overnight and then plant them in little styrofoam cups. They do a couple dozen and make nests for the cups in the shredded paper of one of their greenhouses.

Eduardo rebuilds some solar ovens into the shelter of a refrigerator, but it’s too hard to turn to follow the sun and the angles aren’t great. They get warm enough to make sun-tea but not hot enough for rice or pasta or dried beans to cook. 

“When you go out, look for anything curved and heavy. The cover of a charcoal grill, a satellite dish, something…big and bowl-shaped. And heavy.” He seems as frustrated with the lack of new materials as Tyler is with not going out for six days. 

Day seven is cooler, the night cold enough that Tyler wishes him and Jamie had gone back to their bunk instead of sticking to the private room, despite all the blankets they have. 

“Tomorrow,” he whispers, and Jamie snuffles in his sleep.

==============

Tyler pounds on the door of the brownstone with the side of his hand, leans in and listens. Fucking waste of time, but he couldn’t really argue with Jamie that it would be super-rude if somebody was still alive in one of these. He’d probably be pissed if he was sitting eating breakfast and some asshole just pry-barred into his front door. 

“That’s not how you make friends, Tyler,” Jamie had teased. Tyler snorts, remembering it. He turns to look at Jamie in the street smashing heads. He’s about to complain that _Oh look Jamie, another empty house_ when one of the windows upstairs opens.

Tyler steps back, so startled he almost falls off of their front steps. 

“Go away! We have a gun!” a man’s voice yells out. 

“Yeah, okay,” Tyler says, but he forgets to actually leave. “Hey, we live over at the Bryson apartments. You know it?” 

“Fuck off! Get out of here!” something about the way he says it, the way he’s not showing the weapon makes Tyler doubt he has one. He steps back another step, looks at the house again. The bottom floor windows are cracked open, even though it’s literally near-freezing out here. 

“Hey, your sewer backed up too?” Tyler asks the window. There’s a long pause. 

“What?”

“When the power went out, the pumps died. The sewers backed up. Filled your tub?”

More quiet. 

“So?”

Tyler shrugs, tries to get any glimpse of the guy. “Hang on. We’ll be back with a tool. We can fix it for you.” He looks along the front of their house, where the brick meets a two-foot wide strip of rowdy grass. The cap is there, just like it had been on the apartments. Hopefully the sludge won’t be too frozen to flow. Hopefully this’ll count for something.

“Seriously?” Jamie asks, and Tyler shrugs. 

“We’ve got surer bets on spending our time today, but this could be a big win. Making nice with the neighbors.”

They go get the tools, tell the others where they’ll be. 

“You bring them back here and _you_ find stuff to keep them busy,” Kara warns him. Brittney frowns at Tyler. He thinks she’s probably found a new knife somewhere. The idea makes the hair on the back of his neck prickle.

==========

Tyler stands in the road when they get back to the brownstone. It looks just like all the others, and if it wasn’t for the windows being open, he’d think he had the wrong one.

“Hey!” he calls, “Just us! I’m gonna just try to fix your valve. Cleaner. Thing.”

“Tyler,” Jamie groans behind him, but house-dude doesn’t shoot him so it can’t be too dumb. Or maybe the dumb is disarming and the guy would feel bad for shooting an idiot. Either way, he takes the lack of bullets as agreement and goes and opens the valve. It’s not the grand gusher that the apartment building’s was, but it comes out pretty steady.

“Okay, we’re done here,” he calls up. Wonders if the guy is even still around. Maybe he’d been a traveling scavenger too, in and out and the windows just open for a little fresh air while he was there.

“Just give us a yell if you need something!” Tyler calls out, but he’s probably wasting his breath.

===========

The snow starts just before nightfall. What Dallas calls snow. Wet and sloppy, the kind of stuff that will freeze to a thick lumpy sheet of slickness on the sidewalks, on the roof. 

“Think we should go up and close the fridges over the greenhouses?” Tyler asks Eduardo. 

Eduardo makes an unhappy groan, “Ugh. But yeah. It might get colder overnight.” They’ve put too much work into those small plants to see them freeze to death over fifteen minutes of laziness. 

“I’ve got it,” Tyler says, and goes to get his jacket from his bunk. He’ll grab a flashlight on his way out, in case it’s too dark to see what he’s doing. 

“I’ll come,” Jamie says, but Tyler waves him off. 

“No reason in both of us being cold. You stay here and you can warm me up when I get back.”

Mikaela groans and somebody throws a sock at him. “Get a room,” Tom teases, even though that would be the opposite of getting warm. 

“Be careful!” Jamie yells after him. The biggest threat is slipping on a patch of ice. Seriously, Jamie. 

Tyler puts on his boots and grabs his bat and the flashlight and goes. The halls are creepy-dark. He goes up the stairs, his steps echoing and lonely. 

The wind is whipping over the garage roof, and one of the greenhouse plastics has come loose in a corner. He tucks it in and closes that one first, careful that the door of the refrigerator won’t crush the plants. 

His cheeks sting and he should have worn more than the sweater-gloves over his hands. Tiny pebbles of frozen rain whip his face. He has to tuck the light under his chin so he can use both hands to get the doors down. Shit, he hopes he’s not squishing anything important.

He gets the last one down and goes as fast back down the stairs as he dares on the slippery footing, back through the doorway from garage to the inner halls of the complex, back around towards Jamie’s place. 

He turns the corner and there’s someone there, a figure standing, caught in the beam of his flashlight.

Brittney. 

Tyler takes a step back, makes himself lower the tip of his bat again. 

“You lied to me,” she says, angry, dangerous. He can’t see her right hand, the way she’s holding it, half-behind her body.

Tyler takes another step back. 

“What? When?” 

She takes a hitching breath. “When you brought us in. You fucking. You said…”

Oh. Oh, shit. 

Tyler shakes his head. “I never lied. I never—I just. I wanted you in. I wanted you safe. You wouldn’t have believed…”

“I thought—” she gestures wild, and there’s the knife, a small orange kitchen knife with tangerines painted down the blade. It flashes in the light, dancing like a butterfly, a tiny spark of spring in the winter cold.

He steps back again, wondering if there’s any way to get past her without hurting her. 

“I kept waiting!” she snaps. “I was. Waiting and waiting and you never. Nobody ever and.” She takes a heaving sob, tears on her face. 

“I’m sorry?” he says, and this is fucked up, this is real and his fault, that he left her not-knowing, that he forgot to make sure that she got it, that they are safe here. 

His eyes are on the blade, or he would have missed it falling, hitting the cement and bouncing away. 

“You fucking asshole,” she says, and rushes him. He pulls back but can’t swing on her, can’t _hit_ her when it’s his own fucking fault she’s so fucked up.

Her hands slam into his chest, drive him back another step. 

“You fucking! Fucking! You asshole!”

He doesn’t think it’s him she’s pissed at, not right now, but she’s got nowhere else to put it, nobody else who can take it so he does. Lets her pound on him until she’s spent, until she’s sobbing more than yelling. She falls against him and he catches her, holds her close and wishes he knew what the hell to do with this.

==========

Jamie isn’t sure when Brittney leaves, but she comes in with Tyler, her face streaked with tears, his eyes dark and worried. 

If she wasn’t leaning into him, sheltering under the arm around her shoulders. If this wasn’t _Tyler,_ he’d think— he’d think a bad thing had happened. Think he’d taken advantage. 

“What the hell?” Tom asks, moves to his feet in the sharp contrast of one of Dion’s headlight rigs. 

Tyler shakes his head, guides Brittney towards Kara, who opens her blanket up for the girl to come to her.

Jayden wriggles out of his bunk and goes to his sister, wipes her face with his little hands, presses his cheek against hers. 

Tyler climbs up into bed with Jamie, and if Jamie hadn’t been looking, he’d have missed the wince. 

“What the hell?” he whispers, echoing Tom. Tyler’s breath hitches as he slides in between the covers, kicks out of his pants and wriggles out of his jacket. He’s cold, and Jamie wraps around him, lending his warmth.

“She’s…adjusting,” Tyler says, like he’s having a hard time putting words to it. “She just figured out she’s safe here. It’s kind of a big deal.”

“You okay?” Jamie whispers, his hand reaching under Tyler’s shirt, against his chilled skin. Like he could feel a bruise, a cut, a scrape.

“She wasn’t trying to hurt me,” Tyler says, and Jamie isn’t sure about that. 

“Once,” Jamie says, quiet so only Tyler can hear. “She gets to do that to you once.”


	27. Chapter 27

Jamie wedges the pry-bar by the doorknob of one of the houses and leans on it. The door pops open with a crisp snap and he goes in, Tyler right behind him.

Their list of stuff to look for is getting smaller as they go, as the distance they’d have to transport it back outweighs its usefulness. Shells for new solar ovens. Sewing kits. Any kind of edible plant seeds. Yeast packets. Guns and ammo. Garden hoses. Rope or cable. Anything for kids. Anything at all.

They go through the house pretty quick; Tyler takes the upstairs--checks the closets, the bedside table, under the mattresses. Jamie gets the downstairs—living room, kitchen and pantry. There’s a bread-machine so he keeps looking, finds a couple red-and-yellow packs of yeast that he stuffs in his pockets. He bags up some of the food that’s unusual or especially useful—coconut milk, Crisco, cake-mix, and piles it by the front door.

This row of houses has a garage in the back with an open deck built over it, so Jamie isn’t surprised when Tyler comes down with a three-foot-wide shallow bowl, dark metal dusty with soot. 

“It was the pan in a fire-pit,” Tyler says, and Jamie thinks it’ll do. It’s heavy enough that it’ll take up most of their cart. Time to take a trip back to base instead of keep exploring the neighborhood some more. 

“Let’s get the garage and we can mark this one done?” Jamie asks and Tyler sets his prize down by the door.

The garage is mostly-empty, a rack of very expensive and very useless power tools. A garbage can tipped over on its side. Something covered in a tarp. Jamie watches Tyler’s back as he goes up to it and yanks the tarp off.

Tyler grins. They’ve found motorcycles before, but none of them had ridden one before, and nobody was willing to risk a broken arm learning at this stage of the apocalypse. This though, is the least intimidating vehicle on the planet—a pale turquoise Vespa, shiny and waiting for them, a matching helmet sitting on the foot-rest. 

“You think we could?” Tyler asks, and Jamie shakes his head, smiles anyway. 

“You have fun with that,” Jamie says. The surge of fondness, of happiness, catches him by surprise, and he thinks he wants to see Tyler smile forever. Wants to get married, wants to grow old together. 

Tyler sits down and turns the key and the motor makes a cheerful little putt-putt chatter. 

This is good. They’re good. 

Tyler turns the scooter off and pushes it up the garage steps into the house, through the kitchen and to the front door. Jamie grabs the fire-pit dish and opens the door. Tyler looks up and his smile falls away in surprise.

“Oh. Hi.”

Jamie drops the disk and puts himself between Tyler and the outside. There are people there, a man and woman, thick jackets and blankets around their shoulders. 

“We. We need something,” the man says. “You said… We’re out of water. Running low on food. We need…”

“There’s room for you,” Jamie starts, and the woman nods, relief in the sagging line of her shoulders.

================

The newcomers are Dan and Liza, a database architect and HR manager. Older, like in their forties. They remind Tyler of his parents. He doesn’t think they’re good for much--they don’t know how to do anything that’s special. They spent the first month of the end of the world hiding in their house—they’d been among the ones stocking up at the first whisper of trouble. They’re not tough people. Tyler thinks they’re nice enough but kind of soft. Still, they’re another two pairs of hands on the moving and sorting, more people to help bring in supplies. They don’t socialize a lot, but they don’t complain, either. 

They keep to themselves, even if they sleep in the same room, in a new set of bunks. Tyler figures they’ll either settle in by spring, or leave when the weather gets better, when they can go out and scrounge for themselves. 

================

Jamie finds a book about babies and brings it home. Mikaela starts keeping a calendar, so she’ll know how Elle is doing, how she’s growing. Ofelia put garden notes on it. Tyler watches as his birthday comes up and goes past. Being eighteen years old feels really big and really small at the same time. Jamie asks him, a couple times, if he’s okay, and Tyler doesn’t know how to put it in words so he says he is.

Ofelia joins Brittney’s class times, teaching the children Spanish and broadening her grasp of English. Tyler listens in sometimes, but like hell is he gonna take a turn reading out loud. In a month or so, it’ll warm up enough that the kids can go out without worrying they’ll be too cold. Everybody will have to work again, but for now, it is good to see the kids being kids, going to school, playing board games.

Kara and Nikki and Tom seem to be making a go of it. Tyler doesn’t think the women are gay or bi, but they love each other, sleep better next to each other. They aren’t going to fight over something as insignificant as a dude, and Tom seems content to roll with that, to be with the pair of them, even if Nikki isn’t in any hurry to take things physical with him. The three of them take over the middle bunk, under Jamie and Tyler.

Kate gets better. Not well, not great, but better. She spends more time _here_ than not-here, starts asking questions, making suggestions. Starting actions without someone guiding her. She’s done a lot of camping and stuff, and she helps Alfonse add a filtering system on the water to make it cleaner before it’s collected.

Jamie gets better at playing Wonder Wall on the guitar, improvising when he forgets how it goes, slipping in chords and flourishes that are different every time, eyes down like he’s embarrassed for not getting it right.

Marshall grows, her legs getting longer, her paws still too big for her body. Sometimes she’ll sleep on Tyler’s feet, but she prefers the kids, sleeping between Darius and Jayden on Brittney’s bunk. The other dogs seem to have their own favorite people—the Australian shepherd with Ofelia, the little one with Loui.

Eduardo kills time drawing on Tyler with marker, the point cold and damp on his bare skin, the drag of it giving him goose-bumps as much as the chill in the room. He likes the way it looks, though. Enough to put up with the hours without a jacket on, his t-shirt sleeve rolled up over the cap of his shoulder. 

Towards the middle of February, the morning planning sessions turn to running one long scrounge. Making one push into the outside world while it’s still cold enough that the blighted are moving slow and stupid. 

“What’s our objective?” Jamie asks. “What do we need that we haven’t found yet? What do we need the _most_?”

It comes down to three things: a book on prescription drugs, so they can use what’s at the pharmacy in the grocery store, more guns, or seeds. 

“If we go after a book?” Jamie prompts and Eduardo brings out his printouts from the last days of the internet, pages through. 

“We’ve got a library four miles north, or eight miles east.”

“Guns?”

Eduardo shakes his head. “The gun stores are sure to be empty or guarded. The best I could suggest would be to hit the highway and search cars. People with guns would have taken them with them. But it’s not sure or quick.”

“Seeds?”

Eduardo shrugs, hesitates over the answer. “There’s Home Depot, Lowes. A couple different ones. But. Those are big name targets. A lot of people know about those. They might be picked over, or there might be people squatting there. Maybe unfriendly people. The big stores might not have even gotten their seeds yet, with all the Christmas displays taking up space…”

“So if not those,” Tyler prompts. 

“Rossetti’s Garden. Six miles east. It’s more elite, more specialized. Nobody would go there except for plants, and that time of year…”

“Not a lot of people would have thought of plants,” Tyler finishes. 

He looks to Jamie, letting him call it. 

“How far from the garden place to the library?”

Eduardo turns his map sideways. “About three miles.”

“A day up,” Jamie says, calculating the path. Tyler nods his agreement. Who knows what they’ll run into on the way. To count on it being any quicker would be dumb. “A day between the two places to find what we need. Another day back.”

“As long as it’s too cold for the dead, we can take the Vespa. It’s not fast, but better than walking.”

Jamie mutters about embarrassing, but the next morning they ride out of the gate, Jamie’s feet nearly dragging the ground as he rides on the back, his hands on Tyler’s waist. They take a day’s worth of food between them, count on finding supplies on the way. 

The thing about the Vespa, is it’s loud enough that people can hear it, if they’re close to a window, if they’re outside scavenging. It’s slow enough that they’re still in sight when the people come to check it out. It’s the least-threatening vehicle on the planet, even with Jamie and Tyler and their pair of baseball bats on it. They see people, on the way east, stop and wave a few times. Nobody comes close enough to talk though.

“We should have brought pen and paper,” Tyler complains. 

“We don’t need to bring them all in,” Jamie says, and he’s probably right. Still. Tyler thinks he’d like to have more neighbors. Maybe not people staying with them—maybe not more new people living in their rooms, but it feels like it would be better, for the world, to not leave people out in the cold.

It takes them four hours to go eight miles, winding their way through an unmoving landscape of cars and dead. 75 is lower than the surrounding streets at the point where they cross it, and they stop on the overpass, look down the long river of unmoving cars, the dead and undead packed between them in one frozen jam. Even with it being winter, he’s glad they didn’t try to go down there looking for guns. It’s too many, way too many. Even unmoving, they give him the creeps, to see it. Like that old movie about the birds. 

The blighted aren’t moving at all in the morning, and only slightly swaying in the afternoon. They stop once, to lift the Vespa over a mess that’s too tangled to drive over. A hawk calls above them. Grackles feed on the blighted and the corpses. 

Tyler knocks on the library door out of habit, and Jamie snorts at him. Jamie tries the pry-bar, but the lock is reinforced, the most-vulnerable part of the gap covered with a metal plate. 

“Plan B,” Tyler says and hefts the bat up.

A hand slams the inside of the glass, smacks it twice, with authority, and Tyler steps back in surprise. 

“Don’t you dare break that glass!” the woman on the other side says. She takes a key off of her neck and opens the lock. She’s probably younger than Ofelia, maybe Kate’s age, her hair frizzy and her hands shaking even as she stands between them and the books.

“What are you here for?” she demands.

She isn’t the lady who helped Tyler find books on house-training Marshall all those months ago, but she seems like she might help them. 

“There’s a pharmacy,” Tyler starts, and she almost slams the door in their face. Jamie gets his foot in there, grunting at the force with which she pulls it closed. 

“Not like that!” Tyler hurries to add. “We’ve got people. We’ve been lucky, nobody has been hurt bad or really sick yet, but it would be good to be able to use the medicine if we needed it. We thought there’d be a book or something. Like a list of what’s wrong and what medicine will fix it.”

She looks him over. “How many people?” 

Tyler has to count in his head. “Nineteen. There’s three kids, one baby. Women and men.”

She stops crushing Jamie’s foot with the door. “I knew you’d come,” she says, and Tyler wonders if three months alone has fucked up her head. 

“Us?” he asks.

“Civilization,” she answers. “Rebooting.”

She turns and walks away and they follow her through the small branch library. “Nonfiction, six-fifteen. Medical reference books.” He doesn’t know how she can read the spines in the near-dark, but she finds the small book, hands it to him. 

“What else do you need?” 

Tyler shrugs, helpless, and turns to Jamie. 

“I don’t know,” Jamie says. 

She hums, like his answer was vaguely annoying to her.

“Then come back later. My name is Wendy. I’ll be here. Don’t you dare break my window.”

Jamie hesitates and Tyler can feel him getting ready to be a good Samaritan. “I’m Jamie. This is Tyler. Is there anything you need?” he asks.

“This was a storm evacuation center three years ago. The county stocked it for fifty people to spend a week and then forgot about it. I think I’ll be okay for a little bit longer.”

Jamie frowns. 

“Is there any chance you’d move? Come back with us?”

Wendy hums. “Ask me again when you’re prepared to move my books.”

“We’ll be back,” Tyler promises. “If it stays cold, if we can get here safe, we’ll come check on you.”

She looks through the front windows. “It should be safe soon enough. The dead won’t be walking for long after this frost.”

“Huh?” Tyler would feel dumb, except that Jamie says it at the exact same moment he does.

“Haven’t you seen them?” Wendy asks. “They died. The heart stops pumping, the blood pools in the legs. Lividity. The legs and feet swell. The cold comes, and the blood volume will freeze. Not only will the cell structure be compromised, like frostbite, but the musculature, the structure of the feet. Be careful of sheltered places, but the streets should be safer soon.”

Tyler and Jamie share a look. “Oh-kay.” Tyler draws it out, not quite ready to believe an idea like that. But if it’s true, it changes everything. 

“Is there anything else?” Wendy asks, like their presence is an interruption to her otherwise fascinating day. 

“Not today. I don’t think so,” Jamie says, and they take the book, let her walk them to the door and lock them out. 

It’s barely one in the afternoon. If the garden store is this easy, they could be home the same day they started. They could go on a separate trip tomorrow.

===========


	28. Chapter 28

The three miles from the library to the garden center are a mess. Something must have clustered the dead together, because the streets are packed. They go as far as they can without shoving in among them. The closest blighted turn, jaws slowly opening and closing. Shuffle towards them like a slow wave of tar. 

Jamie taps Tyler’s shoulder, points off into another direction. Tyler gives the Vespa some gas, and they go around, take side-streets and back roads, cut across yards a few times. 

“I had friends, lived a few blocks that way,” Tyler says when they stop to share a jar of peanut butter, a couple cans of Dr Pepper. They aren’t much closer to the garden store than when they left the library.

“Let’s go see,” Jamie says. At best, he’ll help Tyler find someone else who cares about him. At worst, Tyler will have another tiny piece of closure. They finish eating and ride again.

Tyler turns the scooter down a narrow road, between hundred-year old bungalows, houses with arched doors and bay windows made of small squares of glass, tiled roofs and petite yards full of weedy flower beds. 

They cut back once, when Tyler misses the turn, but they find the right one. 

The house is empty, the glass on the back door broken, bloody hand-prints on the knob inside. 

“I painted that wall,” Tyler says as they walk through, reverent and quiet in a way they haven’t been in other-peoples’ houses for months. The wall is a bright teal, cheerful and pretty in the afternoon light. The rest of the room is chaos, furniture overturned, signs that someone slept on the couch, bloodstains on the upholstery. 

“Let’s go,” Tyler sighs and Jamie thinks he underestimated ‘worst’. 

============

Rossetti’s sign is carved wood, the profile of a red-haired woman, a rose held to her face, swirling curling lettering, a wrought iron fence that is as heavy as it is decorative. 

“Fucking finally,” Tyler says as he turns off the Vespa’s engine. Jamie starts on the gate, and Tyler takes the bat, starts laying down the dead who are still on their feet. This time in the afternoon, the sun is less-bright, but the air is warmer, and the dead hiss and reach for them, bite air in anticipation of biting flesh. They barely walk though, shifting their weight, moving an inch at a time. Some of them overbalance and fall, crawl towards him. He makes a circle around Jamie’s back and then widens it, making sure that even the ones on the ground are done. 

Jamie is sweating when he finally gets the gate open, cheeks red and breathing hard. They drag the Vespa in. Tyler finds a rag outside and brings it with him to tie the gate shut. If they don’t draw attention to themselves, they shouldn’t have a problem. 

Rossetti’s Garden really is a garden, curving groups of flower pots, now dried up and dead, frozen and un-watered. Tyler thinks of all the scavenging they’ve done just to get enough dirt to fill up the starter-cups for the beans, and the wealth of resources catches his chest. They could do so much with this, if they could just get it home safe, if they could just find a way. 

The center of the garden is the shop itself, and that’s locked too. This one breaks a lot easier—just a few minutes with the pry-bar and glass shatters, wood cracks, metal gives. 

It’s dark inside, and Tyler turns the key on the scooter, powers it up and turns on the headlight. They’ll have to find her some gas in the morning, but with that many cars outside it shouldn’t be too hard. 

The inside of the store is all neatly organized-- samples of different soils available in touchable bins, a water-pond display that’s gone stagnant and smells like dead fish. A rack has pictures of roses and blackberries, but the narrow, plastic-wrapped packages on it don’t look like any kind of plant Tyler imagined. 

“We should have brought Ofelia or Eduardo with us,” Jamie says, but they both know that wasn’t an option, not for a first trip.

“We aren’t going to find what we need in the dark,” Tyler says, and Jamie hums his agreement. 

“We’ll sleep here, get up in the morning and get what we can,” Jamie says. They split up, Tyler taking a flashlight, looking for somewhere to sleep. He finds a pile of tarps in a back room. They smell earthy, dusty, the plastic not exactly welcoming, but it’s better than nothing. Together, Jamie and Tyler move the Vespa back with them, park its three hundred pound bulk in front of the door, just in case. They settle down, press into each other for warmth, stiff cold plastic over their jackets their only blankets. 

Tyler’s stomach grumbles, and they’ll have to find something to eat tomorrow. Maybe there are snacks somewhere here, maybe they’ll be able to break into a house that didn’t belong to people he knew. 

A pop-pop sounds in the distance, like fireworks, or the first kernels of popcorn going in the microwave. 

“Shit!” Jamie whispers. It’s dark in here, but maybe plenty light outside to fire a gun. 

“What the fuck are they doing?” Tyler wonders, as the shots continue. There’s a long pause, and then three cracks in quick succession. Nobody needs guns for the dead right now. They must be shooting people. Killing people. The idea makes him sick, even if he’s done the same, even if he knows what it felt like to smash the skull of a man he hated. 

They lay awake, waiting for someone to come, afraid to turn on a flashlight. Tyler thinks they should have brought the pistol, even though they’d decided against it for the bulk it took up, the inexperience both him and Jamie have with it. Shooting his own foot off no longer seems like as much risk as not having a gun if they need it. 

He stays awake a long time, sleeps when his body just can’t stay awake any more, when he can’t hold himself tense and waiting. He wakes in the morning, Jamie warm and wrapped around him, and the world is quiet.   
============

Jamie takes the lead as they sneak out in the morning, toes numb and stomachs aching with hunger. Scout around but they can’t find anything unusual, can’t find any people alive or dead, within half a mile of the garden center. They find a car though, the back door unlocked. Whoever had owned it had packed for the trip. He grabs the cloth grocery bags, makes sure it’s actually ready-to-eat food and then rejoins Tyler at the curb where he’s keeping watch. 

“Come on,” Jamie says, soft and subdued, “Let’s get what we came for and get out.”

They go back in the garden center, tie the gate shut behind them. Jamie never thought he’d regret putting down a hundred of the blighted, but the bodies make a clear mark that someone has been here. It makes him nervous, but he doesn’t think it’s worth the risk to try to move some still-upright ones closer to them. They’re so lethargic they barely track his noise. He’d have to carry them into place, and that is not something he’s prepared to do. 

They eat while they work, stuffing stale Oreos into their mouths, taking sips of the Rossetti-labeled water bottles. Tyler finds a half-empty rack of winter-garden seeds towards the back of the showroom and starts packing them all into plastic zip-locks like Ofelia said, then into his backpack. Jamie goes through the rest. There’s a garden cart on display with big wheels like a bicycle, and he’d love to take it, love to fill it high with treasure and bring it home. They need to be faster than that though, need to be quiet. The altercation they heard the night before could be anything, could have started over territory or possessions. Whatever it was, they need to just stay the hell away from it. 

Jamie searches behind the counter, through seed and supply catalogs, through plastic cups with employees names on them in marker-- Lauren with pink flowers around it, Todd with oak leaves. Most of what he’s looking at is junk or so unfamiliar he doesn’t know what to do with it. Boxes of some kind of mechanical thing marked ‘broken,’ ph test kits that are open, empty cardboard trays. 

“What about this?” Tyler calls. He’s got one of the boxes that matches the broken stuff under the counter.

“What is it?” Jamie asks.

“A pump for ‘water features’? Maybe Alfonse could use it to pump water up to the garden instead of us carrying it? It says it’s battery-powered.”

Jamie nods, shrugs. “Sure.” 

He gives up on the counter, ends up standing by the display of roses, blackberries and raspberries. Slender shrink-wrapped bundles about the size of his forearm, with twigs sticking out of the top. “Is this alive?” he asks. The bundles feel light, dried out. 

Tyler joins him, takes one and breaks the stick. It kind of bends and splits instead of snapping clean; the wood is green inside. Jamie reads the label, and it says the plant will fruit the first year. He opens his duffel bag and starts packing them in, all of the berries and one of the roses. 

“Sentimental,” Tyler teases, and Jamie shrugs. 

“Thought it might bring up morale. I’ll let Ofelia decide if it’s worth the dirt to grow it in.”

Tyler scoffs, but he’s smiling.

There’s a rack that has flimsy wooden crates on it, the tops open, bags of roots inside. They grab the strawberries and onions and garlic, some of the seed-potatoes. 

They go through the back rooms together, and the office. There’s a box, there on a shelf, wrapped in plastic. It has the same logo as on the rack of seeds. Next spring’s shipment. 

Jamie never thought he’d be so glad over a box of fucking seeds, but he wants to whoop and cheer. 

They get everything packed, and it’s still late-morning. 

“I think we leave the Vespa,” Tyler says, and Jamie knows he wouldn’t dump it without reason. “It would be faster and easier to ride, but it’s quieter to walk. Safer. They won’t hear us coming. If we think it’s safe, we can come get it later.”

Jamie closes up while Tyler watches the street, wrapping a chain around the gate, hiding the place where there’s no actual lock on the end. 

They walk, hungry and cold and tired from a night sleeping rougher than they’re used to. 

They aren’t trying to find the site of the conflict (actively avoiding it in fact) but it’s hard to tell the living-who-were-just-killed from those that wandered around for a while before they got their brains smashed. They’re in the middle of the freshly dead before Tyler sees the gun in a man’s hand, freezes and looks around.

“Shit, Jamie—” he says.

Jamie sees it, the bodies, a dozen or more, bright red blood seeping through camouflage hunting jackets. Weapons. Just lying on the ground. 

“Shit,” Jamie sighs out. So many lives wasted, lost. So many dead that there wasn’t anybody around to take the fortune in firearms left in the street. Tyler twists the pistol out of a dead-guy’s hand.

“Here, help me get the rest.”

Jamie wants to say no, that they don’t need the firepower. But they can’t leave it just lying there for somebody else, somebody worse than them. Jamie grabs a rifle and the ammo to go with it, finds a bag full of clothes and dumps it out, puts the guns inside. Shit. Holy shit. 

They’re considerably more weighed down when they start walking again. Tyler hesitates, looking towards home and back the way they came from Rossetti’s. 

“If anybody was left to fuck with us, they would have taken the guns,” Tyler says. 

“You want to go back for the Vespa?” Jamie asks. 

Tyler fights down a smile. “I want to go back for it all,” he says. 

Shit. Okay then.


	29. Chapter 29

Tyler and Jamie limp home almost at nightfall, Tyler numb from the vibration of the scooter, Jamie pushing the garden cart loaded high with guns and seeds, clean new water hoses, stacks of plastic flower pots, shovels and hand-tools, garbage bags full of the light dry soil from the dead plants. 

Eduardo is there at the gate, camping out in a lounge chair, covered with blankets so deep that they don’t even see him until he moves. 

“Hey,” he says as he opens the gate for him. “We almost didn’t keep a watch for you guys. Didn’t think you’d come in so late.”

Tyler struggles the Vespa over the curb and into the complex, comes back and helps Jamie get the cart in. They’d been taking turns, one cutting ahead, clearing the way as much as possible, scouting for the best way to get the cart through. The other came behind, pushing the cart. 

“Come on, leave that there.” Eduardo says, “We’ll come down and unpack in the morning.”

Tyler shakes his head, too tired to form words. 

“It’s full of guns,” Jamie says, and starts to head for the corridor that’ll take him to the garage, where they can take the ramp instead of dragging the cart up the stairs. 

“What?” Eduardo asks, gathering his blankets around him, hustling to catch up and help push. 

Tyler gets the scooter out of sight and then fights the urge to throw himself on the cart. His head hurts and he’s so hungry his stomach has given up, light-headed and exhausted. 

“Where’d you get guns?” Eduardo asks.

Tyler grabs the front of the cart and helps pull. “Some rednecks. We took the guns off of them.”

Eduardo looks at Tyler like he’s never seen him. 

“You are _not_ that badass,” Eduardo protests, and Tyler gives him a mysterious grin. 

“Bullshit,” Eduardo says. “I don’t believe you.”

Jamie is too tired to jump in, and Tyler just gives a shrug like ‘Well, if you don’t believe me…’.

They get to the fourth floor and Jamie parks the cart outside the apartment door, digs the bag of guns out. Tyler is falling asleep on his feet, eyes closed and shoulder against the wall. Jamie taps him and brings him inside. He gives Eduardo the bag, “Laundry room, I guess,” he says, unable to come up with any better, safer place to put it. 

Eduardo takes it and nods, and Jamie steers Tyler into the bedroom. Kara is sitting up reading by a car’s headlight; the rest of the group are in their beds. 

“Jamie!” she whispers as they come in. “Tyler! Are you guys alright?” 

Jamie grunts and Tyler nods. Tom rolls over and gives them room to step to their bunk. Jamie kicks his shoes off, nudges Tyler until he does the same. They climb up, and Kara brings them snack-packs of trail mix (the cheap kind full of candy-covered chocolate and too many peanuts) and cups of water. 

“Anything urgent?” she asks, and everyone is awake by now, watching, listening. 

“No,” Jamie says. 

“Then tell us in the morning.”

Tyler is just glad he doesn’t actually need to reply to that. His eyes are already closed and his brain shuts down. 

=========

The weather turns as February ends, cutting off any plans Jamie had of making another long run. They focus on the planting, the outside teams putting soil at the top of their wish-list, bringing back window boxes and cart-loads of dirt they dug out of landscape beds. Kate joins them as they gear up one morning. Tom and Jamie share a glance. Nikki gives her a spare set of gloves. Tyler keeps close beside her, but she does her job and doesn’t pay much attention to the crawlers Tyler smashes before she would have to.

They bring the loads back, up the garage to the roof. Ofelia fills each fridge half-full of shredded paper and cardboard they’d torn over the winter and the top half with the good soil. The little plants take off in their greenhouses, protected from snap changes in the weather by thick plastic shower curtains. 

Inside, the group spreads out again; privacy becomes more important than warmth. 

“We need to move,” Kate says one morning. “Not far, just to the other side of the complex. The north and east sides, where the sun won’t warm through the brick in the summer.”

Jamie has lived here longer since the blight began than he had before it. Despite how weird it feels to leave his home, Jamie agrees, and they start setting up rooms, carving out neater passages up on the fifth floor, where the apartments are bigger and the corner they want is all one apartment. 

==========

Tyler smashes the skull of one of the crawlers with the mop-handle that once smashed his throat. So few of the dead are walking anymore that it was making his back ache to bend over and pop them with the bat. The thing flops over when he shoves it towards the pile. Its hands are gone from dragging itself around, the front of its chest scraped down to bare bone, the lower jaw naked and exposed. 

He steps back, wipes the sweat from his face, flaps the lower edge of his t-shirt to get some evaporation going. 

“We should go to the library sometime soon,” Tyler says. There are a lot of blighted today, but they’re not much of a threat anymore. 

“I’ll have Kara go through and see what we can spare that Wendy could use, or special things she might like.”

“I’d like to come,” Kate says, and busts the next crawler’s head open. “See what her setup is like there, if she can use some help. She might be more comfortable with a woman than one of you guys in her space.”

Jamie considers, and then nods. “Yeah, sure.”

Tyler doesn’t get it, until they’re leaving with a stack of books for each person of their group and no fucking Kate, that it was her plan all along to stay a while. 

===========


	30. Chapter 30

Laundry is men’s work, a winter’s worth of clothes, towels, sheets, that were easier to pile in an empty room than to wash in frigid water, dry in the cold damp air. It’s not that Kara and Ofelia couldn’t do it, but with the blighted being easier to keep away, easier to put down, it’s better to have Kara and Ofelia going through buildings that Jamie and Tyler already cleared, Tom and Loui running with them. They look for the things Tyler and Jamie didn’t see the value in, things they didn’t know at the time they’d need. Apparently there’s a search on for containers that seal, to put the flour and sugar in so the rats stay out of it.

The second warm week in a row, Tyler volunteers them, and Jamie figures it’s just a better allocation of their resources to have him and Tyler on the brainless physical labor, letting people who know what they’re looking for go out this time.

They use a series of bath tubs, cut free and dragged out of the apartments they had been in, filled with water warmed in the sun up on the garage roof. They put a pile of laundry and some soap in the first one, just water in the second. Tyler strips down to his underwear and stomps it clean. Him and Jamie wring most of the cloudy water out of the cloth and dump it into the next one, clean water. Jamie stomps the detergent out, and they do one last tub of rinse before they load it up into shopping carts, push them up to the roof to hang it to dry on a web of cables and shower-curtain rods, flapping in the wind, warmed by the sun. 

When the water’s too dirty to use, they scoop it up into buckets and carry them to the bathroom of the apartment they’re using for flush-water. 

It’s good work, hard but simple, and Jamie loses the day in it, soaked to the skin but glad of the coolness when they go up to the roof. Tyler turns pink across his nose, red on his shoulders. 

They use the last batch of rinse-water to clean up in, washing off the sweat and soap before they get dressed again. Eduardo is coming down from the roof with dinner, then. Kara and Ofelia finish putting away their finds, and come to the fifth floor garage. It gets a better breeze than the apartments, and is shaded from the Texas sun. 

They sit around on couches they’ve dragged out. Kara teases Tyler for missing chocolate bars, hidden in the back of a closet like contraband. 

It’s a good day, and Jamie eats his beans and rice and sprouted birdseed. Listens to his people and their comfortable chatter. 

“Hey,” Tyler says, nods towards the ramp up to the roof. Jamie hesitates, because he’s still eating. There’s food enough, but there never seems to be the time to eat the kind of calories his body was used to. 

“Bring it with you,” Tyler says, and Jamie can do that. 

They go up and around, and the sun is setting, red and orange smeared across the western sky. Tyler leads the way through the lines of laundry, past the fifty or so garden beds they’ve managed to get started. Sure, and with purpose. Jamie eats his dinner as he walks, wanting to be ready for whatever it is Tyler has in mind. 

Tyler nudges their shoulders together and they duck under the last wash-line, and there’s a mattress sitting there, spread with sheets and pillows, waiting. 

Tyler glances at Jamie, a smile playing at the corners of his lips. Jamie shakes his head, grins back at him.

Tyler strips his shirt off, stretches tall and lean in front of Jamie and Jamie puts his bowl down. He doesn’t think he’ll ever understand, how someone as fucking beautiful as Tyler wants to be with him, but he’s past the point where he’ll question his luck. 

Tyler is just fucking breathtaking, slim and strong, Eduardo’s latest artwork swirling up his arm, wrapping around the cap of his shoulder. 

Jamie stands his ground as Tyler stalks up to him, kisses him slow and sure. Jamie puts his hands on Tyler’s bare waist, feels the warmth of his skin like the warmth of the cement roof radiating up through his shoes. 

Tyler nuzzles in, tugging on Jamie’s earlobe with his lips. Jamie’s breath hitches and Tyler smiles against his neck. 

“This is gonna be good,” Tyler promises, reaches down and finds the hem of Jamie’s shirt, pulls it up over his head. 

There’s nothing soft left about Jamie’s body, half a year’s hard work and quick meals burning off everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. It’s not a hockey body anymore, too lean, too light for that. He hasn’t stepped on a scale, but he’d bet money he’s the lightest he’s been since he recovered from his growth spurt at seventeen. 

Tyler draws him down to the bed, pushes him flat on the mattress. 

“Who’d you get to move this?” Jamie asks, and Tyler grins. 

“Eduardo handled it. I dunno who he got to help.”

Even after so long of living in each other’s pockets, Jamie blushes, that the others helped set up a place for him and Tyler to fuck. 

Tyler, shameless creature that he is, doesn’t look like he cares a bit, working Jamie’s jeans buttons and spreading the fly open. He rests his hand there in the V, on Jamie’s underwear, against the heat of his dick. Staring down into Jamie’s eyes like he’s found something amazing.

“Hey,” Tyler whispers, leans down to drag his teeth over Jamie’s pec. Pulls back to look again. 

“C’mon,” Tyler begs Jamie, backs his plea up with a nip to Jamie’s hip. Jamie gasps, arches at the bite, and Tyler’s eyes sparkle in the sunset. He’s not sure what Tyler wants from him. 

Jamie traces the dark swirls of marker on Tyler’s arm with his fingertips like he can feel the difference. 

The wind brushes over their skin, whispers through the leaves of the rooftop garden. It’s warm up here, the heat baked into the cement releasing into the air, but it’s better than inside, behind walls and windows that were never designed to take advantage of the natural breezes. The sheets under him cling to Jamie’s damp skin.

“Let me hear you,” Tyler says, rubbing his cheek against Jamie’s stomach. Jamie doesn’t know whether to laugh or hiss. They’ve been too long surrounded by people, secret touches slow and silent under the covers after everyone else is asleep (or pretending to be for politeness’ sake). Jamie bites his lip, takes a jagged breath. Tyler’s lips brush against the clothed shape of his dick, teasing, taking his time with Jamie for the first time in months. 

“Please,” Jamie whispers, squirms as Tyler’s thumbs stroke the hollows in front of his hip bones. 

Tyler hums, sits back on his heels. Jamie groans as his touch pulls away. 

“I’ve gotcha,” Tyler murmurs. “I’ll get you there. I just want to hear you. Want to see you come loose.” 

He wriggles out of his own jeans and then comes back for Jamie’s, taking more time than he had with himself, baring Jamie to the sky. It feels decadent, wild. 

“The others…” Jamie says, and Tyler climbs up on him, straddles his waist. 

“Eduardo is on it,” he says. “Not that they’d hear us over the wind anyway.”

There’s enough cloth, plants, angles of the building, that Jamie thinks he’d have to shout at the top of his voice for anybody to hear him.

Jamie swallows hard, licks his lips. “Okay,” he murmurs, puts his hands on Tyler’s hips, strokes with his thumbs. 

Tyler just looks so fucking _delighted_ to get his way that Jamie makes a silent promise to make sure he gets it more often, that he remembers how easy it is to make Tyler happy. 

“I think I forgot how to be heard,” Jamie warns. Not that he was ever especially vocal. “I need. You gotta help me remember.”

“Yeah,” Tyler says, too serious for the occasion. “I got you. I’ll always have you. You know that, right?” 

Jamie runs his hands up Tyler’s sides, feels his ribs move as he breathes. 

“Yeah,” Jamie whispers. “I know you’ll never let me down.”

Tyler smiles, soft and content. Slides down so their bodies are pressed together chests to crotch. He kisses Jamie’s neck, sucking and pressing with his teeth. Grinds them together. 

Jamie’s breath hitches and Tyler murmurs encouragement. He kisses Jamie’s collar bone, nuzzles the center of his chest. Jamie has a flash of embarrassment for the hair on his chest—Nair is a thing of the past, shaving more than his face is just not practical. 

Tyler teases a tongue around one of Jamie’s nipples.

“Shit,” Jamie hisses, okay wow, that’s a part of him he never thought had any connection to his dick.

“Yeah, like that,” Tyler whispers, his breath tickling the spit drying on Jamie’s chest. 

“Yeah,” Jamie echoes, putting more voice in it. Tyler looks up, eyes twinkling, and then he licks his way down Jamie’s stomach, puts a tiny kiss to the tip of his dick. 

“Please,” Jamie murmurs, and Tyler licks his lips and then plunges his mouth over Jamie, taking him down in one quick stroke, his mouth hot and wet, enthusiastic and skilled. 

“Fuck!” Jamie barks out and Tyler rewards him by sucking hard. 

“Shit shit, fuck, Tyler,” Jamie babbles, and Tyler reaches behind him, cups Jamie’s ass in his hands, holds him tight as he bobs on Jamie’s dick, his lips held tight enough that it’s so fucking intense, perfectly warm and wet. 

“I’m gonna…” Jamie gasps and Tyler holds on, his nose pressed to Jamie’s pubic hair, breathing hard and then swallowing, sucking, drawing the orgasm out of him almost by force. 

“Fuuuuuck!” Jamie groans, just enough presence of mind left to make it loud, make it loud like Tyler wanted. 

Tyler sucks him dry, licks him clean, and then scrambles up to straddle him again, his feet tucked in against Jamie’s hips, his butt there against Jamie’s rapidly deflating cock. Jamie reaches a hand for Tyler’s dick, still come-dumb and clumsy, but Tyler bats it away.

“Fuck,” Jamie babbles. “You fucking. Shit, I can’t even think.”

“I’m gonna come on you,” Tyler says, warning or promise, Jamie doesn’t even give a fuck, just wants it. 

“Yeah,” he gasps, puts his hands on Tyler’s strong thighs. Feels the muscles bunch as he strokes himself, watches Tyler’s hands on Tyler’s dick. Holy shit it’s been too long, too long since he’s seen him, felt him, got off with him like this. 

Tyler strokes himself, pants and groans, curls over Jamie and then he’s coming, hot squirts spilling over Jamie’s chest, up his neck. 

Tyler collapses over him and Jamie wraps him in his arms. It doesn’t seem nearly as warm as it had when they started, and he pulls a corner of the sheet up over them, wraps them up sticky and sweaty. 

They lay together, just breathing, recovering from the intense pleasure of it that was so much more than the bare release they’d had for so long. 

“Hey,” Jamie says, deliberately not whispering the words. “Tyler. I just. I love you. I want you to know I love you.”

Tyler looks up at him, and Jamie doesn’t know if the surprise is that Jamie feels that way or that he found the balls to say it.

“I love you too,” Tyler says, cups his hand behind Jamie’s neck, presses their foreheads together. “I love you.”


	31. Chapter 31

They make a run to the library mid-summer, leaving a few hours before sundown. Wendy had asked for yarn, for like knitting or something, and they’d gone through a bunch of homes for the third time, looking for the supplies for her. 

They bring gifts of chocolate and canned milk, fresh clothes and towels, an air-mattress and pump. A laundry-basket full of yarn and whatever crafty stuff was with it. A tiny Tupperware container of fresh blackberries. The load of trade goods fills up the cart they made to pull behind the Vespa, and the sight of it fills Jamie with pride.

Kate comes home with them when they leave the next morning at dawn, Jamie walking with her while Tyler putts the scooter along. They’ve got new books, more than Jamie thinks are actually necessary, enough that the little engine strains to pull the weight. 

“I think she’ll move to the complex when winter comes,” Kate says as they walk. “I talked her down to five thousand books, and a promise to come back for more in the spring. If we can set up to move them…”

Jamie shakes his head. “I don’t know. That’s a lot of days work, a lot of trips. Where the hell would we even put them?” 

Kate sighs, and nods. “Yeah, I know. I know. But she’s going to be stubborn about it. She won’t leave without them. I tried talking her into it, seriously. She doesn’t have the supplies. She’ll freeze or starve before she’ll leave those books behind. We can’t just let her die on us. She’s too _important_ to not have.” 

She looks frustrated, and Jamie understands what she’s saying. Not that being a librarian is more important than being a person, but it’s just double the reason to help her even if it’s a massive inconvenience. 

“Five _thousand?_?” Jamie asks, the enormity of the number making him cringe. “Why do we even need that many?”

“It’s not about needing; it’s about preservation,” Kate corrects, like she’s heard that a hundred times in the past two months.

==========

They’re halfway back to the apartment when Kate pauses, looks at one of the mobile signs that used to be put on roads where drivers go too fast. The “Your speed” readout is flashing double-dashes, the Vespa’s crawl too slow to register. 

She stops walking, and Jamie stops walking. Tyler gets to the next intersection before he realizes he’s alone. He turns off the scooter and puts down the kick-stand and trots back to them. 

“There is no way the Vespa’s going to tow that,” he starts, but Kate is walking around the trailer, sizing it up. 

“We don’t need the trailer. We need the solar panel off of the top, the battery controller, all the cabling.” She climbs up, starts muttering about voltage and load.

Jamie shares a glance with Tyler. This isn’t the kind of unbalanced they’re used to from her, but neither of them is following a word she’s saying.

“I’d uh, rather not get electrocuted today?” Tyler says. 

She makes another walk around. “Have you seen any more of these?” 

Jamie shakes his head, but Tyler nods. 

“Not in a long time, but there’s a place under the overpass where the road service stores their crap. There’s a bunch of these. Like the road-hazard ones, and speed ones.”

“What good are they anyway?” Jamie has to ask. “Can Alfonse hook them up to something useful?” 

Kate snorts. “I thought I’d do it.”

Okay, Jamie was not expecting that. “You’re an electrician?” 

Kate climbs up on the trailer, flips a switch and the sign goes off. “I've had time to read up on it. I think I can manage.”

Well shit. It looks like he’s going to spend the rest of the summer moving heavy shit. Wonderful.

============

The runs to the library are going to be numerous enough that Jamie takes the man-hours to have him and Tyler clear a path, shoveling the stinking piles of bones and rotten meat out of the way, moving rubble and mess, putting makeshift ramps up and down curbs. They look for other small vehicles, riding lawnmowers, recreational four-wheelers, even jogging strollers with their big wheels. Anything to make the moving of the books and solar setups easier than bringing out shopping carts. 

Jamie doesn’t like the idea of leaving the complex without any of their strongest fighters, without the raw muscle to do things the other people can’t. They break outside team into two smaller units—Tyler, Jamie and Nikki on one, Tom, Loui and Dion on the other. A team will leave in the morning, pack up their transportation with books at the library, stay in the shade through the heat of the day and come back in the evening. The other team will leave the next morning, and the first will rest. They get about five hundred books a trip between each trio, working their way through Wendy’s meticulously prioritized stacks of books. 

Jamie and Tyler are there for the last trip, as Wendy walks through the shelves, checks that no book has been left in a low lying space, that as many of the possible remainders have been brought up to higher spots, the shelves covered with what plastic they can spare. 

She hands Jamie the key, “Another five thousand in the spring, if they make it that long,” she says, and he nods his promise. Hopes he can keep it, that in six months, this will be the most important priority. 

==========

 

Getting their hands on the solar is a lot trickier. “That place under the overpass” is downtown, where the cars are most-jammed, streets that were never designed for big city traffic. Jamie isn’t sure they’d be able to walk out with a single panel, much less get the scooter and cart through for a bigger load. They take a day and don’t get close. Sleep in the back of a minivan and try going around the next day. A large section of the soon-to-be-gentrified neighborhood to the south-east is blocked off, cars deliberately wedged in with empty space behind them. 

The area around the barricade is picked clean, doors cracked at the lock already, cabinets empty. Cars and trucks are searched through, once-precious possessions scattered on the streets. There’s no food, no water. They didn’t bring enough with them to stay out for long without good scavenging. 

“We need to head back,” Jamie says as they hit another dead end, another street too packed to get through. They’re wasting too much time, too much gas. They aren’t finding any full tanks to siphon from either. The sky is turning dark even though it’s the middle of the day; the wind picks up and makes their tires swerve on the road. Jamie leans into Tyler’s back as they creep their way home on the scooter. 

They go as far as they can, before the sky opens up, before they can’t see where they’re going, before the loose trash on the street becomes violent projectiles. 

Tyler pulls off at a dry-cleaner with a covered pickup lane and Jamie busts the door. Nobody has bothered breaking in before them, and they search by the light of the scooter, helped by the flashes of lightening outside coming through the windows. 

It smells of death inside, a slow-moving blighted, emaciated and weak, comes shuffling out from the back, and Jamie takes care of it, drags it by its feet outside into the weather. Meat falls from the bone as he drags it, like a chicken that’s been left in a slow-cooker for too long.

Tyler pulls piles of clothes out of the back, strips the plastic off and makes them a nest in the least-horrible part of the lobby. They lay down, not really tired but there’s nothing else they can do. The wind howls outside and Jamie worries about the apartment, about the garden up on the roof, about the people who might go out there to try to protect it. 

The tone of the wind changes and Tyler’s breath picks up where he’s pressed hard against Jamie. 

“Shit. Shit, is that a tornado?” 

Jamie holds him, shields Tyler’s head with his arms, wraps around him as the walls shake in the blackness. 

The roof stays on.

The walls stay up.

Water comes in, seeping under the door, up through the pipes. They wake up wet and chilled, no food, no clean liquid to drink. 

Jamie leaves the damp nest, goes and looks outside. There’s a tree down across the road, and the road itself is full of water up past the curb, an unbroken sheet that spills into the shop when he opens the door.

“Any idea where we are?” he asks, and Tyler digs the Mapsco out of the scooter’s under-seat storage, passes it over. Jamie thumbs through.

“Looks like we’re about five miles south-east of the library,” he says. That puts them about thirteen miles from home. “I don’t think we’re gonna get the Vespa through that.”

“We’ll come back for her,” Tyler says, quicker and easier than Jamie expected. He’s worried about home too, worried about the tornado he heard.

So they pull the Vespa into the back room, hide it behind the motorized racks of clothing. They brace the door as best they can, pile it with debris so it looks like nobody has been there since the outbreak. 

Tyler hitches his backpack up on his shoulder, shifts his grip on the baseball bat. Jamie takes the pry bar and his own bag, packed as light as he dares. They walk, shin deep in water as they cross the street, murky around their ankles as they get up on the other sidewalk. 

They walk, blisters forming from their wet shoes, the sunlight cutting through the clouds and coming down mercilessly hot on their shoulders. It’s humid, the air heavy and thick. 

Jamie sees the group first, more than half a dozen people walking the same direction they are, clustered close, their body language reading _scared and exhausted._

One of the group must see Jamie and Tyler because they turn. Jamie freezes and Tyler walks into his back. 

_Young,_ is Jamie’s first impression. They’re all kids, except for the very tall, dark skinned woman who is stepping in between Jamie and the teens. She’s older, plain and tough-looking, her body and face both made of hard lines, sharp angles. 

“Keep walkin’,” she yells across the space between them. 

He can feel Tyler tense at his back, ready to follow whatever lead he gives.

“Yeah, okay,” Jamie calls back, but he doesn’t move. There’s a tall blond kid at her left with a baseball bat; a small dark-haired boy with a handgun steps up on her right. The rest cower behind, six of them, he thinks. Some have backpacks, but most have nothing but the clothes on their backs. 

“How can we help?” he asks, and the kid with the gun shifts, doesn’t quite raise the weapon to point at him, but the threat is there.

“Jamie,” Tyler says behind him, and yeah, this isn’t like Brittney and Jayden. This is a group that could fuck them up if it came to it.

Still, they’re fucking kids, and Jamie can’t leave them in the street without at least _trying._

“We’ve been around outside,” Jamie says, hoping he doesn’t get shot. Hoping he doesn’t get Tyler shot. “You’re heading the right way. Everything south of here has been pretty much stripped. You’ll do better a few miles west and north.” 

The woman says something to the boys, and the barrel of the handgun dips a little lower. 

“There’s a library,” Jamie says, thinking of the key he’s got hanging from his neck, ‘just in case’. “I’ve got the key. We moved a bunch of books and the librarian out, but you can have that if you got flooded out of where you were before. It’s on higher ground; it might be dry inside.”

The woman gives a jerk of her head, a ‘you first’ nod and Jamie does _not_ like the idea of nine people behind them, but he glances to Tyler.

Tyler rolls his eyes and shrugs, and okay, fuck, they’re doing this. 

They lead the way, Jamie comparing street signs to the Mapsco every few crossroads. He’s not sure if the landmarks they’d seen coming in are unrecognizable because of the flood, or if they’re actually on a different route. 

“Wait up,” one of the boys calls from behind them, and Jamie stops, turns. Doesn’t go back until the woman waves them over. 

The blond guy is supporting a slender little slip of a girl, her face hidden under her hair. Her hand is wrapped around her lower stomach and she’s breathing hard. 

“Oh,” Tyler says, and Jamie winces. He’d have gone slower if he’d known one of them was pregnant.

“She needs to slow down,” the blond says, and the one with the gun looks frustrated but doesn’t argue. 

“How much further?” he asks Jamie and Jamie shrugs. 

“About two miles, but we’re not making good time.”

“We could start looking for supplies,” Tyler says. “Give them time to rest for a minute.”

“Bernice?” the blond says, looking to her for a final decision. She gives them a nod. The blond lifts the girl up onto a wall so she can sit and be dry while she rests. 

Jamie and Tyler head off to start popping some car doors, maybe break into a house. 

The small kid follows them. Jamie doesn’t know if he still has the gun. They go through some cars, all wet inside, steamed up from the September heat and humidity. 

“Think we could go through a couple houses?” Jamie asks. They’re in a neighborhood of small mid-century single-family dwellings. 

The kid, Ethan, goes with them up to the first one, lets Jamie make sure the room is clear and then beats them to the kitchen, quick and methodically searching the cabinets.

“You guys are a pretty mixed bunch,” Tyler says into the clatter of cans and bottles. Jamie pulls down a stack of dishes, leaves the dusty top one and puts the rest in his backpack. They’ll use them and leave them at the wall. 

“Look for a can-opener,” Ethan says instead of answering.

“Already got one,” Tyler says. “You guys get stuck at school when the blight hit?”

“The what?” Ethan looks up, dark eyes, his face pinched and scared.

“Dead guys? Walking around?”

Ethan snorts. “That’s what you call it.”

“Bernice your teacher?” Tyler prompts, and for all he plays dumb so much of the time, he sees more than Jamie sometimes.

Ethan snorts. “Have you seen her?” There’s a certain ugly emphasis on the last word. “They don’t let people like her be teachers. She’s the fucking lunch lady.”

Tyler takes a breath, like he’s trying to not lose his temper. “Looks like she’s taken pretty good care of you guys so far,” he says, a rebuke that Jamie doesn’t get. 

Ethan looks down, guilty. 

“We have a place,” Tyler says, softer. “She could be a teacher there.”

Kara is going to kill them, Jamie thinks.

“We had a baby born,” Tyler adds. “Back at the beginning. No doctor, no hospital. A healthy mom and kid. Her name’s Elle, and she’s almost a year old now. She’s starting to pull herself up. She’ll be walking any day now.”

Ethan finds the bag full of bags under a counter and starts packing food into them. Shoulders stiff. Afraid, and it makes him angry. 

“Come on, everybody’s hungry,” he says, and Tyler grabs a pair of bags, Jamie another three. 

===========

The library is still above water, the sidewalk above the water-line, debris washed up against the curb. 

Jamie unlocks the door and hands the key to Ethan, but him and Tyler stay outside. The sun is going down. Tyler’s feet hurt, sore from walking, blistered from wet socks. He misses his bed on the roof, figures it’s probably a sodden mess by now. 

“We need to leave in the morning,” Jamie says as they break into a nearby car to sleep. “Whether they come or not, we have to go see what’s going on at home.”

Tyler doesn’t like it, but he likes the alternative even less, so he nods. “Yeah. Of course.”

Ethan comes to the door when they knock in the morning. 

“We gotta go,” Tyler tells him. Looks over his shoulder to see if someone with more authority is there to talk to, but it’s just him.

“Did you mean it?” Ethan asks. “That you got room for us? That Bernice can be.” He doesn’t finish the sentence, letting the lack of ending mean ‘everything.’

“Yeah,” Jamie says. “We’re working on a garden, and we’ve got space, clothes, clean water, books. Women who know how a birth should go.”

Ethan reaches down and picks up his backpack. “I’ll go with you. Make sure you’re not lying.”

Tyler nods. He can appreciate the caution. “You gonna tell Bernice so she doesn’t think we stole you?”

Ethan fidgets.

Tyler wants to laugh. “Didn’t think so.”

Ethan hesitates. “I’ll go tell Kyle. He can let her know after I’m gone.”

Tyler glances to Jamie, looking to see if he’s going to veto. It doesn’t sound like a great plan, but they’ve got nothing to hide and Bernice would probably not let him go if they let her choose. The odds any of them would come would go way down. 

Jamie shrugs. Not his circus, not his monkeys.

===========

Ethan keeps up on the way back to the apartments. Tyler teases the story out of him, tells how Dion and Eduardo went down to south Dallas to get Darius from his dad’s house and Tyler went to Deep Ellum to get them, shares the terror of that trip, losing the boys (shit, he can’t remember their names, can’t remember their faces). 

Ethan tells how the announcement that school was canceled didn’t get to everybody. How kids who rode bikes or walked to school showed up. A few teachers. Bernice. Forty or so of them, but not everybody stayed. Some tried to get home, despite the teachers trying to keep them where it was safe. 

And in the aftermath men came. Police uniforms. The teachers let them in, tried to keep them happy. Mr. Fletcher got shot when he wouldn’t let them fuck Amy, and Amy got fucked anyway.

He says it mechanically, like he’s talking about a book he read one time or something. Tells how he helped Bernice break into the school’s drug-dealer’s locker and got the baggie of roofies. How he brought them sodas and they beat him up and called him a skinny faggot. How him and Bernice slit their throats while they were fucked up.

He says it like a cautionary tale. _We’re young but we’ll fuck you up if you fuck with us._

“Brittney and Jayden are the newest people to join,” Tyler says. “I mean except for Dan and Liza, but they really haven’t been out in it. Jayden doesn’t talk, but Brittney knows what it’s like outside. She can tell you how it is with us. Help you decide if you want to come in.”

They get to where 75 cuts north and south through the city, a deep chasm that’s full of water now, bodies floating in the rubbish. Thousands of them, maybe tens of thousands, a river of death as far as they eye can see. 

They don’t talk much after that.

================

The complex looks fine from the outside. Nobody at the south gate, but Jamie doesn’t worry yet. The office and the garage are both flooded, but the ground floor apartments look like they’re above the water. The north gate is locked and empty too, and Tyler steps back to the opposite curb, looks up at the open windows on the fifth floor. He puts two fingers in his mouth and whistles.

For a heart-stopping minute, Jamie thinks nobody will come. That something has happened, the gate failing all over again. That they’ve _lost_ everybody.

Then Eduardo pops his head over the rail of one of the stupid little Juliette balconies, the rifle to his shoulder. He sees them, yells something and ducks back. 

Jamie counts as they wait by the gate. Thirty seconds per flight of stairs, four flights to come down. Eduardo is out of breath. 

“You fucking assholes!” are the first words Eduardo says once he’s got the breath to yell at them. “We thought you were fucking dead.”

He grabs Tyler and hugs him tight, tucks his head under Tyler’s chin and holds on. 

“We’re okay,” Tyler assures him. “How’s it here? Everybody okay? What’s with the gun?”

Eduardo shakes his head, pushes back and starts heading upstairs. “Saw some people moving through. Four guys.” 

_No women, no kids,_ Jamie translates. Trouble. 

“They didn’t fuck with us, but we were watching for them to come back. Should have known it was you guys. The dogs didn’t bark.”

Ethan follows them up, looking around like he expects to get jumped any second. Eduardo looks back and notes him, but doesn’t say anything.

“The storm?” Tyler asks.

“Not great,” Eduardo says. “Ofelia called it, that we needed to close the growing beds even if we crushed the plants a little. A couple of them blew open though. We had to replant some of the grapes and the strawberries got battered. Crop’s gone but the plants should live for next time. Kara…she says it’s not broken, but she slipped on the roof and fell hard on her wrist. She’s got it wrapped up. At least it’s the left.”

Jamie winces. Shit. They should have been here. Should have been able to help. 

He’s not sure if what they found was better or worse than coming back empty-handed.

“What do we need to start work on?” Jamie asks, but Eduardo shakes his head. 

“There’s not much left to do. We caught as much water as we could; that’s the good news. The plants we could salvage are back in the ground. Wendy put Liza and Dan to work making a card catalog and organizing the books.”

Tyler nods. “We ran into people out there.” He points with his thumb, back over his shoulder. “This is Ethan. They were in a school until they got flooded out. We need to show him around, let him talk to whoever he wants to talk to. We’ll take him back to the library when he’s decided if we’re safe or not.”

“Kara is going to kill you,” Eduardo warns. 

Tyler nods again, resigned. “Yeah, I know. I know.”

“How many?” Eduardo asks.

“Nine.”

“Shit. She’s really going to kill you. We’ll have to double down on…fucking everything.”

“We know,” Jamie says, not willing to let Tyler shoulder this like it’s his fault. “But we’ll have nearly twice the people who can work on it. It won’t be too bad.”

Eduardo snorts, and Jamie hopes he’s right. That they can take this kind of mass influx.

Shit.

=============

It takes four days for the streets to dry out. Tyler watches Ethan use the time to talk to everybody, following Brittney around until Tom has a talk with him about boundaries and body language. He hangs out with Darius for a day and talks to Eduardo and Dion. He bugs Kara, and she gives him work to do while she answers his questions about where they’ll sleep and what they’ll eat.

Jamie and Tyler sit down with Eduardo and a map, start planning out a re-canvas of the area to bring in more canned and dried food. They’d thought they had as much as they could eat before it would go bad, but with half again as many people they’ll need a lot more food. Kara puts in that they may as well get as much as they possibly can since there’s a good chance of finding more strays in the shelf-life of the canned goods. They talk it over with Kate and Dion. Just how much a priority the solar panels are. How long the nearby gas will last if they’re just using it to charge batteries for warming lights. As much as Jamie would like to see their energy resources taken care of, he agrees that it’s a project for later. Winter if they can travel safe, spring if that’s the soonest they can get a group out there.

When they leave for the library, they take a big group—Ethan, Tyler, Jamie, Nikki and Tom. They bring the other small vehicles, so Amy doesn’t have to make the walk back, so that they can bring more food and water with them than they can carry. Wendy’s stash has to be running light by now.

Bernice comes out as soon as they’re in sight, grabs Ethan by his shirt and chews him out, “What were you thinking!” and “Do you know how worried I was?”

She doesn’t hit him though, and Ethan takes the yelling and then lets her hug him. 

Tyler thinks that’s important. To be sure it’s the right thing, inviting them in. 

Nikki and Tom plan on staying the day and then starting back. Tyler and Jamie pack two days worth of supplies and a red gallon-jug of gasoline and start walking. Head for the shop where they hid the Vespa. 

Jamie and Tyler catch up to the rest on the journey back to the apartments, and they’re all together as they go through the gates.

Nine more, Tyler thinks. Nine more, in and safe. It’s exhilarating, and overwhelming. He thinks though, that they can make it work.

They kind of have to.


	32. Chapter 32

Nine new people. It takes a couple days to get them in and settled. It’s close enough to winter that it’s not too hot to stay in the south west corner of the complex, back in Jamie’s old rooms. They open the wall, joining the room they used last winter to the master bedroom next door. Everyone will move in to share heat and light when it gets colder, but the kids can be alone there for now. Can have the privacy and extra space while they settle.

Jamie gives them three days to rest up, and then calls a meeting over breakfast in the garage. Him, Bernice, Kara, Ofelia, Alfonse and Eduardo in a cluster at the center. Tyler and the rest in a wider circle. Thirty people. They make a big group, spread out in the parking garage, sitting on chairs and couches dragged out of vacant apartments. 

“We’re really going to have to hustle to be ready for winter,” he starts. “What are our priorities?”

“Food,” Kara puts in, and that’s not a surprise. Fuck, it’s like they’re starting over. At least they can go outside this autumn. At least the dead on the street are next to no threat.

“How many weeks do you think we have?” Jamie asks, and she flips through her list. 

“Looks like four months, if the past couple days are average. _Assuming_ we don’t add anyone else.”

The new kids murmur. Four months will take them to the end of January. 

“So we go through the houses we’ve already broken into and get absolutely everything that’s still edible,” Jamie says. “Tyler and I will scout ahead into houses we haven’t looked at yet. Stores, offices, restaurants. We’ll start looking through cars, too. A lot of people packed for the evacuation.” There’s a high rise apartment complex less than a mile west. Dark inside, and Jamie has been reluctant to put his people in there. It might be time though.

“Gas,” Alfonse says, sharing a look with Dion. “To keep the cars running enough to charge batteries for lights-for-light and lights-for-heat.” Kate has already looked at the solar panel they took off of the speed-zone, another from a construction site. If it wasn’t for the new kids, they might not even need much gas.

“We can siphon the nearby tanks and bring the gas up to the cars up here, refill the tanks we emptied last winter.”

“We still have a car that works?” 

Dion nods. 

“Pecans will start to fall in a few weeks,” Wendy says, and Jamie adds that to his mental list.

“The garden?”

Ofelia murmurs to Eduardo. Her English is getting better, but she understands more than she’s willing to speak in front of a group. “The beds we have are done,” he translates. “The damaged plants are back in the ground, and all the seeds are planted that we can do this time of year. It’s probably not enough to feed this many people. If we plant more beds, then water becomes the problem.”

Alfonse grunts. “I can start cutting into the runoff from the apartment roofs. Do the same thing I did with the garage roof. Just further to drag all of that water. And it’s gonna be outside the gates.” There’s still a certain vulnerability to that.

“If we can make it work until spring,” Tyler says. “We can try another run to get more panels. Set up the pumps and hoses to get the water to the roof. The plants won’t need that much water until then anyway.”

“We’ll need more beds in the spring at the latest,” Eduardo says for Ofelia. “We’ve got almost all of the refrigerators, but we can start pulling bath tubs. We’ll need to bring up more dirt. Keep an eye out for landscaping, flower-beds, places where they’d replace the plants often. The root vegetables, we can keep splitting them as many times as we can get empty containers.”

Jamie takes a deep breath. Organizes the priorities in his head. 

“Okay, so food and gas first, until we’ve got a solid surplus, and then we’ll work on planting beds and soil. Who are we putting on what?”

“If you’ll organize the bringing-in, I’ll take Liza, Wendy, Brittney and Amy and get it organized and inventoried,” Kara volunteers. She’s younger than both Liza and Wendy, but neither of them protests. Bernice nods along with the suggestion. Just the walk here had exhausted Amy, but it’s probably better for her to not be completely without work to do. Jamie trusts Kara to make sure she rests when she needs to.

“We’ll take as many as we can for the supply runs. Nikki, Tom and Loui can lead the way. Take two sides of a street and stay close enough to hear if someone has trouble.” 

He looks over the kids. He nods at the big blond boy. He looks like an athlete. Probably Tyler’s age or older. The idea sits crooked in Jamie’s head. He wonders if Tyler seems older because he’s more mature, or if it’s just that Jamie has sex with Tyler. He swallows and gets back to the plan. “Kyle, we’ll put you and Dion on cart-duty, bringing back what the others find. The rest of you following Nikki and Tom and Loui’s instructions.” 

He’s sure Kara will have a list for them.

That seems like a plan, mixing the groups. Getting people more comfortable with each other. “Darius and Jayden can join the rest of the kids searching through houses. It should be safe enough.”

It’s spreading things kind of thin, not many people left inside. “Alfonse, you stay close and work on the rainwater collection. Dan, you help him, whatever he needs. Keep in contact with the walkie-talkies. Mikaela, you’ve got Elle and Akshaya?” She nods. She’ll find something to work on if the little ones let her.

“Eduardo and Bernice? You got lunch?”

Bernice nods. “Yeah. You take care of those kids out there.” She says it like a warning, and Jamie is smart enough to take it seriously. 

“Like they were my own,” he promises. Nevermind that the youngest of her group is only five years younger than him. 

===========

Wendy calls it gleaning--going car to car looking for food, for gas, for useful things their enlarged population might need. Tyler and Jamie are scouting ahead for the gleaners to come behind them when the man walks up, comes up on them, hands open and empty, staring at them like he’s tripping on the good stuff. 

“Hey. Hey, oh shit. Hi.” The guy is tall but lean, pale skin and dark hair, scruffy jaw, his hair cut ragged and uneven.

Tyler steps back, sets down the golf-club and car-mirror tool Alfonse made so they could see any blighted that were trapped under the cars before they got grabbed. He doesn’t pull the bat out of his backpack. Not yet.

Jamie steps between Tyler and the guy, and Tyler is glad they’re scouting wide, that the kids are far from first-contact with someone new. 

“Yeah?” Jamie asks, wary and not as welcoming as he had been for eight teens and their guardian. 

“Whoa, hey, I just. I thought I was alone. I thought I was the last man on earth.”

Jamie stands and waits for him to get to a point.

“I’m Leon. You uh, you local? I mean. I’ve been crashing in a house. Over thata way.” He gestures vaguely. “I’ve got food, if you’re hungry.”

Jamie shakes his head. “We’re just stocking up for winter.”

Leon nods along, stuffs his hands down in his pockets. “Where you taking it. I mean if you don’t mind me asking. So we don’t step on each other’s turf. You know.”

Jamie looks at the intersection, steps back so he’s on the other side of the crossroad’s center line. “We can call this the border.”

“Aw, no, I didn’t mean like that,” Leon protests. “Hey, you don’t have to tell me anything. And if you want to come over, you can loot over here too; it’s fine. Is there anything you guys need? I’m real good at fixin’ stuff. You got fresh water? Food? Maybe we should pool our resources. I’ll pull my weight!”

Jamie glances at Tyler, and Tyler shrugs. The guy seems more lonely than anything. 

“We’re living in an apartment complex. There’s others…”

Leon grins wide. He hasn’t been taking care of his teeth. 

“Sounds like a lot of space. Room for one more?”

That’s how they end up leading Leon back through the cluttered streets, a single backpack of all his worldly possessions on his shoulder. The dude is not rocking the stockpile.

They go up, and the others are already back, everyone already in the garage hanging out, eating lunch. 

“Saved you some,” Eduardo says, but then he looks up, sees Leon between them.

“No,” Jayden chokes, and Tyler’s never heard him speak. “No, no, no.” He crowds back into Brittney, and she wraps her arms around him, pulls him back. 

“What the hell?” Nikki says, standing, wary. Tom jumps in between Leon and her, hands clenched into fists.

“No,” Tom says, and Tyler’s never seen him angry before this. Not at any point. Not even for a second.

“Hey, whoa,” Leon says, hands up, palms out. “Hey, we can talk this out. If there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. Brittney, hey, babe…”

Jamie grabs him by the collar and Tyler crowds the other side, lifts the pocket knife out of his jacket before he can go for it.

“This wasn’t my fault,” Leon says, getting louder, his easy-going presentation falling away. “I treated you good!” he screams at Brittney, but there are too many people in the way for him to see her. Tom and Loui and Dion. Kyle and Ethan. Bernice is wrapped around Brittney and Jayden, a last line of defense.

“Sorry, dude. You’re a risk we can’t take here,” Tyler says. Empty words to get this asshole out as smooth as possible.

“Fuck you!” Leon yells, tries to shrug them off. Jamie hauls him backwards and he has to scurry to keep from being pulled off of his feet. 

They drag him down the stairs, down to the gate. Shit, Tyler thinks, trying to figure out what the hell they’re going to do with an enemy that knows they’re there. That knows they’ve got women and kids, resources. This fucker isn’t going to stop, isn’t going to quit being a problem. 

Tom opens the gate and Jamie throws him out. 

Leon goes skidding on his hands and knees, pushes back up snarling but the gate slams in his face. 

“You’ll be fucking sorry!” he says, “Choosing that fucking skank over me!”

Nobody seems impressed, and he postures outside the gate, walking backwards, screaming abuse at them.

The crack of the rifle is sharp, followed by dull echoes off of the buildings.

Leon jerks and stops yelling. He puts his hand to his collar bone, pulls it away to check his fingertips. Tyler can’t see any blood. Not until he coughs and red mists out with his breath, dribbles down his chin. Leon takes a step back, and then another. Falls to the ground, his body bowed back over his pack. He doesn’t move.

Tyler stares with the rest. Waits for the trick or the joke. 

Dion opens the gate and goes out. Crouches as he walks to Leon’s side, eyes wide as he looks at the nearby windows and roofs. He reaches down, checks for a pulse and then shakes his head. 

Shit. 

They’re all looking out, looking for where the shot could have come from.

Jamie looks up. “That was from inside,” he says, and they run up the stairs, Jamie in the lead. Tyler wants to grab him, pull him back, but if there’s somebody with a gun, somebody inside, Jamie is best to deal with it.

Jamie stops on the third floor landing and Tyler nearly runs into him. 

Eduardo is sitting there by the stairs, the gun on the ground beside him.

His hands are shaking and his face is ashen.

“I had to,” he whispers. “He was. He was going to hurt somebody. He was going to come back. He was. You know he was.”

“I know,” Tyler says, before anybody can start putting pre-blight rules on this. Before anybody can make the right thing out to be something wrong. 

He shoulders through the others, crouches down to Eduardo’s level. Dion pushes the rifle away, metal grating on cement. Puts himself at Eduardo’s other side. Cups his hands around Eduardo’s cheeks and checks his eyes, draws him close.

“You had to,” Tyler says, looks up to see if Jamie is mad or what. “He hurt Brittney. He’d have hurt somebody else, even if it wasn’t here.” 

Jamie looks grim, but he nods. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m sorry. I should have…”

Jamie steps back. Tom bends down and secures the weapon. Kyle and Ethan go back to the others. 

Jamie takes a deep breath, and Tyler can see him tearing himself up over this. 

“It had to be done,”Jamie says. “It shouldn’t have been you. I…”

He turns and goes back down the stairs.

Tyler freezes for just long enough to make sure Dion and Eduardo have each other and then he follows, scrambling after Jamie.

He catches him as Jamie is propping the gate open. He checks the street and Tyler follows after him. He wants to grab on, to take Jamie’s hand, to hold him for just a minute, but Jamie looks too grim, too focused for that. He bends down and pulls the backpack off of Leon’s shoulders, tosses it over by the gate, and then grabs his arms to drag him away. 

Tyler picks up Leon’s legs. It’s been a long time since they moved a body that was so intact, and he’d forgotten how heavy people can be. They move him, down the street. Tyler wants to ask how far they’re taking him, but Jamie stops at a little burgundy car, opens the door so he can pull the trunk-lever. 

It takes both of them to stuff him inside, where he’ll dry out or rot without bringing the stench of death back to the street. There’s nowhere nearby to bury him, and he’s not worth the effort of taking him to the park.

Jamie and Tyler stand there, panting when the deed is done. A moment of silence that is more shock and exertion than respect.

“I fucked up,” Jamie says, when he’s got his breathing under control again. “He would have come back. Eduardo is right. He’d have hurt people.”

Tyler shakes his head. “Jamie. We got this. We all make mistakes, and the others catch it. You’re a good guy. You were trying to do a good thing.” He bumps Jamie’s shoulder and Jamie leans on him. 

They stand there together, until Tom and Loui bring the kids down with their shopping carts.

“Go eat your lunch and then get back to work,” Loui says, not unkindly. Tyler figures it’ll be best for Jamie, to keep busy until he can move on. 

“Got it,” Tyler says, and they go up.


	33. Chapter 33

“I don’t even _want_ this baby!” Amy screams. Ofelia, Mikaela and Bernice are in with her, behind the hanging sheet that separates her out a quiet space to have the baby. Loui is just outside, his face pale and his hands clenched. Tyler thinks he’s reliving the first night, Mikaela giving birth as they dead flowed through the streets in a flood.

The rest of them are crammed into the remaining area, pretending they can’t hear her labor, can’t hear her screams and curses. It’s cold outside, and dark-- a sudden November ice storm making it too dangerous to go out without a better reason than the discomfort of being there while someone suffers and they can’t help.

Tyler tries to focus on Jamie, baby Elle in his lap, the guitar across his knees for her to pluck at the strings. Akshaya holding down chords so it makes something like music.

“I know, I know,” Mikaela soothes. 

Amy screams through her teeth. Cries “It hurts, it hurts.”

“I know,” Mikaela says again. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Det orndnar sig, vännen.” 

“I don’t want it,” Amy whimpers.

“Amy,” Mikaela says, still gentle but with an edge of urgency. “You don’t want this baby. You don’t have to keep. If you can feed her for two weeks, I’ll take her. I still have milk. She will be Elle’s sister. You don’t have to keep. But if you don’t push, this baby will die. You will die.”

Across the room from Tyler, Ethan has his head under a pillow, Kyle has his knees up against his chest, his chin on top of them. Kara is cracking pecans with pliers, Nikki sitting close and listening as Wendy reads to Jayden and Darius.

Amy screams again, and Tyler rubs Akshaya’s back, soothing her worries. 

“The head,” Ofelia says, and Mikaela says “Push now. Push, push.”

Elle bangs on the guitar strings. Jamie coos in her ear. 

Sleet patters against the window, driven by the wind. 

“Wait, wait,” Ofelia says, and Amy breathes hard. “Okay, push now. Push.”

There’s one more push, one more scream and then only Mikaela and Ofelia talking. Tyler holds his breath for long seconds, and then the tremulous sound of a baby’s cry cuts through the tight-packed room. 

A wave of relief goes through the room; Tyler wasn’t the only one afraid to breathe. 

“It’s a girl,” Mikaela says, and Amy starts to sob. 

============

 

They make the memorial in one of the corner apartments on the second floor. It’s out of the way. Quiet. You’d have to want to go there to end up, and Tyler thinks that’s a good idea because like hell does he want to have to walk past this shit every day.

He helps the setup, because Mikaela said it’s something they need. He counts it as his part of being in a community. He helps Jamie and the rest empty out the rooms, takes down the pictures off of the walls. One of the apartments he’s been in had dried flowers, a wreath on the door. He brings them down, lays them against the bare white walls. 

A jar of markers is on the kitchen island, but he can’t. Won’t take one. The guys who did the work stand around, Loui and Tom and Jamie. 

Jamie takes a deep breath. Steps to the wall. Writes in letters half an inch high: James Neal. Tyler wants to run. Wants to leave so he doesn’t have to see this. Doesn’t have to feel this. What fucking good does it do?”

The names go up one by one. Some of them have the player’s numbers with them. Morrow. Modano. Ott and Daley. 

The men are silent at first, until Tom says “Remember that time Jere switched sugar for salt and Mo was so tired he ate his whole omelet sweet before he noticed?” 

Jamie snorts. “Remember omelets?” and the other two laugh. 

Tyler slips out, leaving them to reminisce over people he’d never met. 

It’s days later that he comes back, Eduardo and Dion with him. The walls are marked up by then, handwriting from just about everybody on there somewhere, even Akshaya’s crooked letters. 

Eduardo uncaps one of the markers. Writes the names of his parents, his brother and sisters. Kids he knew. Dion makes suggestions. The waitress that was always good to them at the Cafe Brazil in the gayborhood. 

“You don’t know,” Tyler protests. “They could. There’s other people around. They could be there. They could be fine.”

Eduardo nods. “If they’re alive, it doesn’t hurt to put their name on a wall. But if they’re gone, I want to remember to remember them.”

Tyler clenches his jaw. Wants to yell at them over it. 

Eduardo writes: Casey. Writes the C of the next name and falters like he can’t remember. 

“Cameron,” Dion says and Eduardo writes it. 

It takes a long time, putting all the names they know that aren’t here. Kids off of the street, family members, social workers and panhandlers. 

Tyler’s stomach twists but he stays until they’re done. 

“Leon” is the last name Eduardo writes, small and by the floor. 

“Come on, let’s go eat,” Eduardo says, but Tyler shakes his head. 

“I’ll be up in a bit.”

Eduardo puts the marker in his hand and they go. Tyler sits, stares at the wall in front of him for a long time. 

It isn’t killing someone, to put their name here. Doesn’t mean there’s no hope at all. Right? 

He wipes at the dampness of his eyes, but that just sets the tears to flowing. He crawls to the foot of the wall, reaches out and touches the smooth paint.

He’s making sure they’re saved. Making sure they’re remembered. 

_Ron & David_ he writes, careful with the letters. 

The door opens behind him, and he can’t look up. 

“Shit,” Jamie breathes, and kneels behind him. Puts his arms around Tyler’s shoulders and holds him as Tyler sobs. 

They’re gone, they’re gone. 

He twists in Jamie’s arms and cries into his chest. Cries until he’s empty.

=========


	34. Chapter 34

“We’re not going to get stuck out there without supplies again,” Jamie says, and Tyler thinks it’s a little excessive, the amount of food and water and gasoline they’re bringing, pry-bar, bolt-cutters, baseball bat. Walkie-talkies even though they only have a mile range with the ones in the complex. At least they won’t be whistling to get let in again.

Tyler looks at the size of the backpack he’s going to have to grab and carry if something happens and they have to run on foot. “This is it though. Any more and we’ll be too heavy to move.” The pack for Jamie is just as big. They’re planning on bringing the mini-trailer, but plans change, things happen. With the territory beyond that virtually unknown, possibly hostile, they might have to cut it loose. Might have to leave the Vespa again.

At least the weather has warmed up enough with the changing seasons that it won’t be miserable to sleep rough. If they don’t get caught in the March rains, it’ll almost be like a vacation from the new baby crying at all hours, the press of people around them all the time. Spring feels like a new start. 

Tyler wonders if he’ll ever think of autumn as anything but a blighted time ever again.

Eduardo checks one of the handguns Jamie and Tyler took off of the dead guys and passes it over to Jamie. Jamie puts it into a small purse with a long strap, hangs the purse cross-body over his chest and down to his hip. It makes a decent holster. 

Jamie and Tyler leave on the Vespa by mid-morning, and the air smells clean now, the sun warm but not wickedly hot. 

They cross high over 75 an hour later, pause and stare down. The water has dried, and the road is carpeted with a blanket of bones and debris between the cars, spotted with the bright green of new growth where weeds have taken root. A handful of grackles land and pick through the waste, then take flight again, disappointed in the slim findings. 

It’s almost peaceful.

=============

They go by the library, just to make sure it’s still standing and secure. If they need a spot to rest on the way back, it’s almost at the halfway point. The building looks good, inside and out, the books still dry, nothing damaged.

They go south and east, cutting around the skyscraper core of downtown. Tyler looks for any sign that people have been here recently, but he doesn’t see anything. They’d been so focused on supplies last time, and then buffeted by the rain, that nothing looks familiar. 

“Let’s start looking for a place to stay,” Jamie says, mid-afternoon. And yeah, Tyler is pretty sure they won’t have time to get in and out and back to the library before nightfall. Better to not leave finding shelter until dark.

The neighborhood here is a mix of funny ‘modern’ houses that look like something out of a black and white sitcom and houses like Kendra and Marco’s, old and cute. Tyler picks one at random and they drive up to the back door, park the scooter. 

Jamie goes first, taps the glass out of habit and then goes in. The lock is already broken, but the inside isn’t too trashed. They make a sweep and come back for the scooter, detaching the cart and pushing and pulling the separate pieces up the back steps. They turn the Vespa around, pointing her front wheel at the exit in case they have to leave in a hurry.

There’s a downstairs bedroom. A stain darkens one corner of the ceiling but the bed is dry and doesn’t smell too bad. Jamie brings the backpacks and they sit and eat. They lay down on top of the covers with their shoes still on, their jackets for warmth. They play the “do you remember” game as the sun goes down, naming the dumbest details of the world before that they can think of. The room gets dark.

They sleep, eventually. Wake again when howls cut the night. Tyler’s heart pounds until he realizes they’re far enough away to not be a threat. Not yet. There can’t have been many dogs that survived the blighted, but those that did must have had pups by now, maybe interbred with the local coyotes. Food for them had been plentiful, a year ago, but now it’s rotted away and gone. He’ll have to talk to someone about that. Maybe Wendy will know a trick to keeping them away.

“Go to sleep,” Jamie murmurs against the back of his neck, and Tyler closes his eyes, evens his breathing. Nothing helps him get to sleep like pretending to sleep.

The sky is light when he opens his eyes again, morning sun shining through the lacy curtains and the motes of dust in the air. 

They eat breakfast together, not saying much. They know how to work together, know how to scout and scavenge. This job is just on a slightly larger scale. 

“Feels like game-day,” Jamie says as they go back out into the light. 

It’s barely another hour before they finish the big loop back around south and west to where 75 becomes 45, elevated instead of sunken at this point, 30 ramping off in forks and branches that take it east and west. Under the criss cross of highway is a chain link fence topped with razor wire. Tyler stops the scooter at the gate, just relieved it’s here, that he didn’t take them on a useless tour of downtown, that he remembered right after all this time.

Inside the fence are piles of sand to grit the bridges with in winter, still dry and barren, a pair of utility trucks that they’ll never get through the snarls of traffic and the small sign trailers, some for speed zones, some for construction with light-up arrows to direct traffic. 

“Shit,” he says, frowning. “I thought. I remember there being more.” He does a quick count, looking for panels. Six. There’s fucking six panels. He’d expected dozens. Shit.

Jamie shrugs. “Might have been. The road guys might have moved some out when people started freaking out, trying to direct traffic, keep it orderly. You couldn’t have known.”

Six. Shit. The scooter-trailer 2.0 has mountain-bike tires under a lighter frame, a rubber mat over the arms that connect the empty box to the scooter so they won’t rub blisters on the insides of Jamie’s legs. Six panels will probably be around two hundred pounds. That’ll put at least one of them walking, maybe both of them walking and pushing the Vespa between them to haul that kind of weight. It’s a shitty day and a half of work, but better than taking only half of the panels and coming back all this way.

Jamie starts prying apart the chain that locks the gate and Tyler climbs up on an abandoned car, looking out over the traffic that’s frozen in time, looking for anything moving, anything alive.

It takes longer than Tyler would like, to break in, disconnect the panels, collect all the necessary parts and get it all packed up. The Vespa pulls the weight. Not fast, and one of them has to walk alongside, moving lightweight obstructions and helping the cart over heavy ones.

They’re tired and sweaty and Tyler’s neck is sunburned. They sleep the night in the same house as the last, and somehow it feels like their house, their bed.

They take a different route home; the library is fine and there’s nothing they need there. The cart will definitely not take a load of books on top of the panels. 

They hit 75 at the same place though, and it’s a good landmark that they’re almost home. Jamie cracks open one of the last water bottles they brought. Tyler refills the gas tank from the red plastic container they brought with them. 

“Tyler?” Jamie asks, as Tyler is pouring the fuel. His voice is off. Wrong. Tyler lifts the plastic funnel away from the scooter and looks up. 

Jamie is staring down the highway, and Tyler has a moment, where a trick of the light and the worry in Jamie’s voice makes him scared that the dead have found a way to keep going through this, with their skin and flesh gone, that an army of skeletons is about to swarm up the ramp and trap them on the overpass.

The dead are dead though, a river of bone, gray as the cement they’re scattered over.

Jamie’s not looking down anyway. He’s looking out, to the next overpass, maybe a quarter of a mile away. It’s as wide-open and visible as theirs is. People, _soldiers_ are moving along it, their chests padded out with body armor, some kind of military-looking rifles in their hands. As Tyler watches, a vehicle comes behind them, huge wheels, some kind of angled blade on the front like a bulldozer. It plows the cars and trucks out of its way, flipping and rolling them. The wave of dead cars hits the rail of the overpass and they tumble over with a crunch. More military vehicles drive up behind it— covered transports following the trail-cutter.

“Oh shit!” Tyler hisses and ducks down below the level of the guardrail. Jamie follows him down, but late, too late. One of the soldiers turns, helmet bobbing up as they call to the other one. They pause, trade hand gestures, and the lead vehicle stops too. 

“They saw us,” Jamie whispers. 

“Fuck,” Tyler says back, just as quiet. Knows it doesn’t fucking matter but he can’t make himself be louder. 

One of the soldiers climbs up on the running board of the lead vehicle, says something to the driver. 

Sound comes out of the truck, a voice on a loudspeaker, too far away and garbled by the distance.

“The fuck do you think they want?” Tyler asks, and Jamie shakes his head. None of the guns point their way. That’s good, right?

The voice squawks at them, but Tyler can’t hear what they’re saying.

“Do we go out?” he asks, and Jamie hesitates, then shakes his head.

“If they’re not-friendly, we have to let the rest know they’re out there. We can’t. Can’t just disappear and leave them wondering. Maybe coming looking for us.”

“Oh,” Tyler says. He hadn’t thought beyond getting shot or not-shot. Hadn’t thought what Eduardo or Kara or Bernice would do if they never came back.

“We go home,” Jamie says. “Come on, help me get the wagon unhooked. We can come back for the panels.” He keeps his gaze down on his hands like he’s not sure he’s telling the truth.

They get the cart with the panels separated from the scooter, one eye always on the other overpass. The soldiers seem to have lost interest in communicating with them, back to clearing the street. Tyler turns the key and the scooter motor starts. Jamie climbs on the back, chest tight against Tyler’s spine and Tyler wonders if Jamie is covering him, protecting him with his body.

They ride, but even without the wagon, the Vespa isn’t super fast over the messy road, weaving between cars. The wheels almost go out from under them as they hop a curb and slide on some plastic and Tyler slows it down another few miles per hour. Better to get there than wreck on the way. They get off of the overpass, up onto a sidewalk between two office buildings. 

Jamie’s hands are tight at his hips. They turn a corner and Jamie flinches. “Shit, they’re there,” he says. The truck is making good time through this part of town, the scouting men on foot probably riding inside. 

Tyler cuts down an alley, and the truck is still in sight when they come out the other side, pacing them.

“Shit!” he swears, and Jamie breathes heavy in his ear.

“Are they following us?” Jamie asks, and Tyler feels sick. 

They can’t fucking lead these guys to the apartment. Can’t bring them to their fucking door. They’ve got too many people, too many non-fighters. 

Tyler grits his teeth and turns, cutting in front of the truck and heading north when home is west. He gets Jamie and himself back to what feels like a safe distance away and then pulls up, one foot on the ground to keep them balanced.

The trucks should turn. Should come north after them. Any second. Just turn north.

The trucks stay their original course, heading west. Heading to the complex like they know it’s there. 

Tyler can’t figure out how they’d know where the people are. Can’t figure out why they’re going there. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe they’re heading for somewhere past it (but there’s so many easier roads, so little of value close to the complex). 

Jamie swears, with feeling. Tyler guns the engine and turns west. The convoy is on the road that they cleared to bring the books through, so he cuts through less-familiar tracks, gets pushed farther north than he’d like and has to cut south-east to get back to a road he knows goes through. 

They beat the trucks home, but barely. Jamie calls ahead on the walkie-talkie to get the gate open, to get everybody up, ready. 

Tyler angles the wheel, catches the sidewalk at the wheelchair ramp and bounces through the gate.

“What the fuck?” Dion asks there, steadying the scooter as Jamie and Tyler hop off, legs wobbly from adrenaline, from holding on so tight, from fighting their way around and over the obstacles on the way here.

“People,” Tyler gasps out, at the same time Jamie says “Soldiers.”

Tyler takes a deep breath and tries to figure a way out of this. Maybe the trucks will keep rolling, will drive right past them. He can’t count on it though, can’t trust that kind of luck.

“Jamie,” Tyler says, grabs his arm. “We gotta get the kids out, scattered, hid.” 

This was never a thing they worried about, military-grade weapons and soldiers. They always thought if anti-social types became a problem they’d come in small numbers. Despite humoring Eduardo and keeping bags ready to go, they thought it would always be safer inside the gates.

Jamie nods, once, his eyes dark and worried. 

“Get them moving,” Tyler says. “I’ll stall these assholes as best I can.”

For a scary second Tyler thinks Jamie will argue, but he nods again.

They go up the stairs to the second floor landing together. Jamie hands the purse with the gun in it over to Tyler. It’s a completely un-reassuring weight. If he needs this gun, they are fucked beyond fucking. Jamie hurries up to the forth floor, Eduardo at his heels. 

The trucks come up the road that separates the complex from the grocery store, and they could keep moving. Should keep moving, but they stop, pull into two sides of the intersection. Tyler watches, tries to feel through the plays he could make, but he doesn’t know what the fuck they want, where to start. Motorcycles come behind the last of the trucks, spill past and around the complex. 

Shit shit shit.


	35. Chapter 35

The engines quiet. The dust settles. Tyler’s heart pounds in his chest.

A hatch on the top of the lead vehicle pops open and a man stands up in the gap. Camo clothes, black chest-protection on over it. A big fucking gun slung on a strap across his chest, hanging by his hip. The gear bulks him up, and he’s as tall as Tyler, maybe taller. Gaunt though, shadows between his cheekbones and beard.

“The fuck do you want?” Tyler yells, unable to stand the waiting, the anticipation. 

There’s a clatter of plastic on cement in the corridor behind him, and Tyler looks back to see Eduardo pouring Draino into a dozen soda bottles, strips of foil ready to go in when they need something to go boom.

The guy in the truck reaches down and brings up a CB radio mic. His voice is amplified when he talks. 

“We’re not here to make trouble,” are the first words he says, and Tyler thinks they’ve made it anyway. “We are emmisaries of the New Canadian government. Our mission is to contact and establish lines of communication with survivors of the contagion.”

“Yeah? You said hi, now fuck off,” Tyler yells back, his voice weak and quiet compared to the booming loudspeaker. 

McBeardy’s face quirks. Tyler thinks that’s a grin under all the hair.

“We have medical personnel,” Beardy says. “Food. Water purification. We’d like to work with you. Help you.”

Tom clatters down the stairs and joins him on the landing, eyes wide and breathing hard. “They’re around the back too,” he gasps. “They’re behind us. Jamie’s arming everybody who can fire a gun.”

So Tyler needs to keep them talking. Needs to give Jamie time to make a plan. 

“The fuck did you even find us?” he yells down.

“I’m looking for somebody,” Beardy says. It’s hard to tell from this far, but Tyler thinks he takes a nervous breath. “Name’s Jamie Benn.”

Tyler feels like he got punched. He doesn’t know what the hell somebody could be looking for Jamie for, how they could know he’d be here. 

He can’t think of any good reason somebody would come looking.

“Yeah?” His heart pounds in his chest. “I’m Jamie Benn, what do you want?” 

The guy’s free hand rests down on the middle of the rifle hanging from his shoulder. “No,” he says, anger in his voice. “You’re fucking not. Where is he? What happened to him.”

There’s movement behind Tyler, and he turns enough to see Jamie out of the corner of his eye. Tries to reach out and snag him before he can come into sight, but Jamie walks through his grab.

“Jordie?” Jamie asks, leans out over the railing, looking down. “Jordie?” he says, louder.

Beardy looks up. “Chubbs?” 

“Shit,” Jamie says, worlds of relief in that one word. He turns for the stairs, taking two and three at a time to the bottom, rushing out the gate. 

Tyler is too stunned to even stop him, turns and shares a wide-eyed look with Tom and Eduardo. 

The guy on the truck is climbing down between the windows and the scooper-blade-thingy and Jamie runs across the road at him. They crash into each other, arms tight, holding on. The other soldier-types kind of dissipate, turning the better part of their attention from the complex to the outside perimeter. 

“Tell the guys to be ready but don’t do anything to start the shit,” Tyler says to Tom, and then he goes down the stairs, slower and warier than Jamie had. 

He heads to Jamie’s side, hears the dude with the beard— Jordie apparently, Jesus fuck how did Jamie’s brother get here, how did he _find_ them?— saying “Promised I’d come. I promised.”

“I thought…” Jamie gasps, and Tyler hasn’t seen him cry, hasn’t seen him lose it this whole fucking time. He’s been strong for everyone else, and now he’s shaking, falling apart in someone else’s arms. Tyler wants to shove them apart, wants to be the one Jamie leans on.

Jordie holds on. Lets Jamie surrender to fourteen months of fear and sorrow and carrying around the weight of leading these people. 

Tyler shifts his weight, wondering if he should just go. If he should give them this time. 

Jamie takes a shuddering breath and Jordie pushes him back so he can see his face. “Wow. I don’t think I can call you Chubbs anymore,” he says, and Jamie breaks with a snotty laugh.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” he agrees. “You too. I mean. You’re so thin.”

Jordie shrugs. “I lost some weight in the first winter, and then joined the military and I was working so hard I never put it back on again.”

Tyler looks away again, up to the second story. Gives Dion a thumbs-up before he goes back to Benn-watching.

Jordie must catch the movement because his attention turns back to Tyler. He raises an eyebrow and Jamie suddenly remembers his manners. 

“Jordie, this is Tyler. My uh, boyfriend. Tyler, my brother Jordie.”

“The homeless kid? With the dog?”

And Tyler is about two seconds away from sneering. It’s been a long time since that’s all he was. 

But then Jordie is moving in on him, strong hands coming down on his shoulders and squeezing, like it’s all he can do to stop himself from hugging Tyler like he had Jamie. He clenches his eyes shut for a second, tears glittering on the lashes. 

“Thank you,” Jordie huffs like he’s having a hard time catching breath. “Jesus, thank you.”

“How the fuck did you get here?” Jamie asks as Jordie steps back, lets Tyler go.

Jordie shrugs. “Mom had your address,” he says. “You said you’d be there. And you are.”

“Jor…” Jamie starts, but Jordie holds up a hand.

“I need to get my people settled in first. We’ve been pushing hard the past week, being so close to you.”

Jamie nods, and Tyler has a moment of worry. That many new people in among their kids. Then Jamie says “Yeah, for sure. There’s the grocery store. It’s pretty much cleaned out, but it’s secure enough.”

Jordie nods, every inch the military leader again, turns and starts barking orders. The trucks start clearing a way to the parking lot; the bikes sweep back around and join them. 

Jamie leans back in against Tyler, wipes his face. 

“You okay?” Tyler asks and Jamie nods. Tyler’s not sure he believes it.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good,” Jamie says. “I can’t. Just can’t believe it.”

Tyler squeezes his hand. Leads him back inside the gate, puts him down in the lounge chair they’ve got there. “He’ll come to us when he’s done,” he promises. “I’m going to run up, let everyone know what’s going on.”

Jamie nods, still in shock, and Tyler heads up the stairs.

==============================  
Jamie sits inside the gate, dizzy with shock, with disbelief. He thinks he’s dreaming. Maybe he took a shot to the head. Maybe he’s concussed. 

Jordie. Jordie came. Jordie came at the head of a fucking military operation to keep his promise. 

Tyler comes back after a while, the purse with the gun not on his shoulder anymore. “You okay?” he asks, and Jamie nods more out of habit than believing it.

“Everybody is kind of shook up up there,” he says. “But they’ll be okay. Eduardo is with them, and Tom.”

Jamie nods, tries to get his thoughts back in line. “I don’t want any of them except Jordie inside just yet. I don’t know these guys.” He gets to his feet, and Tyler follows him outside. They let the gate close behind them.

Tyler nods his approval. “Good.” He nudges his shoulder up against Jamie’s. “We’ll need to go back for the panels,” he says.

Jamie hums. “Tomorrow. Maybe the day after.” He knows, knows Jordie wouldn’t let his people hurt Jamie’s people, but the idea of trusting a superior force is difficult to wrap his head around. 

“Maybe we can send them out for it,” Tyler says, shrugging towards the trucks. Jamie tries to count the people, but they all look the same, prying the doors of the store open and moving the smaller of the trucks inside. 

Jamie nods, figures it can’t hurt to ask. 

They watch from their side of the road until the others get settled. Jordie comes back across. The rifle from earlier is no longer on his shoulder. He’s not wearing the body armor. Jamie can’t stop looking at him, the bushy beard, the creases by his eyes, the stark leanness of him. He catches Jordie staring back and they both snort out a laugh.

“Come on up,” Jamie says. “We’ve got dinner ready up top. It’s not exciting, just sweet potato and biscuits. A little bit of greens for everyone.”

Jordie grins. “Are you serious? Do you know how long it’s been since I ate something that didn’t come from a can?”

Jamie still feels embarrassed. Like he’s got too little to offer.

Tyler calls up on the walkie-talking and Darius comes down to let them in. They go up together, to the fourth floor and then cross to the garage, up the last spiral to the roof. 

Kara hands them plates but everybody else is either down in the rooms or on the far side of the garden. Not exactly fearful, but watching. Wary. They walk, and eat. The dogs pace between them, looking for dropsies. Jordie stares at the garden with wide eyes. 

“This is. Jamie, I haven’t seen anything like this since I left Canada. The whole central US, it’s.”

“Tell me,” Jamie urges, the sudden need to know stealing his appetite. They get to the circle of chairs up here and he realizes Tyler’s been guiding them, bringing them somewhere useful. 

Jordie sits down and takes a bite of his food. Looks like he’s trying to figure out where to start. 

Tyler sits down at Jamie’s feet and starts eating. Jamie envies him the ability to eat anything, anytime. Not so much the ways he gained that skill.

“The contagion spread fast,” Jordie says. “When I talked to you, that day. It was already across the continent. The island stayed safe. Closed off. Which is good since it doesn’t get cold enough there.”

He talks for a long time, and Jamie tries to absorb it. The millions of lives lost, the rest of the world still a huge question mark. Canada rebuilding under martial law. They can’t really trust the new volunteer soldiers to follow commands. Everybody has somebody they want to find, someone they lost. It’s easier to group up people with similar goals and match them to a mission that takes them where they want to go anyway. Everybody on Jordie’s team either has someone in Texas that they’re looking for or they’ve got nobody and don’t care where they’re sent.

Jordie’s job is to establish a base here, report via satellite phone, consolidate and support the remaining population as much as possible. 

“We have a medic,” Jordie says. “We’d like to examine any of your people that are willing. Just a base physical, plus any concerns they have.”

Jamie nods. Tyler is sitting on the ground, leaning against his legs. Jamie thinks he’s asleep. The sun is down, the night clear.

“I’ll let them know. It’ll be up to them. I’ll send them in pairs, probably.”

He keeps waiting, for Jordie to ask. What he’s lived through, the things he’s done to survive. He never does though. Talks about their parents and sister until Jamie is struggling to stay awake. 

“I’ll let you get some rest,” Jordie finally says, stands and stretches. 

Tyler squeezes Jamie’s ankle. Not so asleep after all. 

=========

In the morning, ten of them cross the road to Jordie’s people to visit the medic. Jamie leads them— Tyler, Akshaya, Tom and Nikki and Kara, Bernice and two of her kids, Alfonse. 

The store has been transformed overnight, all of the shelving put against the side wall, tents and partitions strung with the vehicles as anchor points. It looks practiced, routine. 

Jordie meets them at the door, and for all that Jamie can’t think where Jordie would have gone, he’s glad he’s there. 

“I’ll go first,” Tyler says, ducking his head like he’s embarrassed, like he’s calling unfair attention to himself. 

“Want a buddy?” Jamie offers and he shakes his head. 

Jamie sits in a folding chair with Akshaya in his lap. It seems like it takes a long time, before Tyler comes out, holding his left elbow bent to keep pressure on the puncture where they took blood. He comes by Jamie, sits on a crate beside him. 

“Seems legit. Not a terrible bedside manner. Should be okay.”

Tom and Nikki and Kara go next, the three of them together. Jordie raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say anything. 

“You okay?” Jamie asks, because Tyler seems a little off. 

He frowns. “Yeah. It’s nothing big. Just. Couldn’t answer a question I had.” He flashes a foil-wrapped square. “Got this though. It’s not expired.” He flips it over to check the date. “We’ve got eight months, if we ever wanted to.”

Jamie feels his cheeks go red. Fucking Tyler talking about things they’d need condoms for when there’s a small child _right here_.

Tyler gives him a smirk and lets it go for now. 

============

Jamie goes last, after he’s walked all three groups of ten down to the med-tent and back. 

The medic, a tough lady named Dana, is gentle but thorough. She takes his blood and a urine sample, gives him a little container for a stool sample later. She takes his weight and blood-pressure, looks at his eyes, nose, ears and throat. 

She asks personal questions like “Have you had any sexual partners since the contagion began.” Follows up with “At any time were you pressured, forced or coerced into unwanted sexual contact.”

He answers no, and lets her guide him to lay on his back. It’s not a cold afternoon, but he wishes he had on more than his t-shirt and underwear.

“Hey,” he asks, as he looks at the tent’s ceiling while she pushes against his abdomen. “The first guy to come in, Tyler. What’d he ask for?”

“That’s confidential,” she says, tells him to sit up and steps behind him. She thumps on his kidneys and then tells him he’s free to go. 

Tyler is waiting outside for him; everyone else is gone. Jordie is there too, but he just nods to Jamie and goes in to see the doc. 

“He wanted us to wait,” Tyler says, and so they sit until Jordie comes out again, a narrow bottle of clear liquid in his hand. 

Jordie tips his head and leads them outside to sit on the tailgate of the truck that went to go retrieve the panels for them. He passes the bottle and Jamie takes a swig, coughs on the raw alcohol burn of it. 

“Oh shit that’s terrible,” he complains. He hands it off to Tyler, watches him take a more cautious drink. 

Jordie grins for just a second before he goes serious again.

“Jamie, look. I’m supposed to send a report. Like I did for all the other settlements I’ve evaluated.”

Jamie frowns, not sure he likes the sound of that. “Okay.”

“I want to let you decide how much you want me to say. They want numbers. A demographic census. General structure of the community. What you would need to survive one, five, ten years. I’ve thought a long time, and I can’t figure any way for what I tell them to hurt anybody here. They might send you more or less aid if they think you’ll live through winter. I don’t know.”

Jamie nods, takes another sip of Jordie’s moonshine. “Tell them whatever you think is best,” he says at last.

“Jamie,” Jordie says, and there’s something different about his voice. “Jamie, you gotta know. What you did here. Two healthy babies, another on the way. Three kids under ten, nine under eighteen. No complaints of sexual assault. That garden, books, dogs. It’s unbelievable. With as little as you had to work with…” He trails off like he can’t express the enormity of it.

Jamie swallows hard, the prickles in the corners of his eyes nothing to do with the harshness of Jordie’s alcohol, everything to do with the gentleness of his words. His mind catches on the ‘one on the way’ bit, 

He shakes his head. Tyler grasps his hand.

“No,” he says, “This wasn’t all me. I had amazing people. We all—”

“Jamie,” Tyler cuts in, soft but firm. “No. We held our ends, but it was you. You pulling us up. You making it work. You—I can’t even imagine this without you. Even if we weren’t us. Even if we hadn’t been together. I’d still have wanted you in charge.”

Jordie clasps his shoulder, stands up. “You did good, Jame.”

It hurts to breathe, and Jamie swears he’s not going to cry twice in two days. Not after so long holding his shit together. Tyler stands up and steps into the V of Jamie’s legs. They’re the same height, and Jamie lets himself lean in. Lets Tyler wrap him in his arms. 

Tyler leans their foreheads together. Presses a kiss to the corner of Jamie’s lips, soft and sweet.

“You did good,” Tyler whispers. Holds him as Jamie feels the weight of leadership, the exhaustion of responsibility, all seep out of him. He feels hollow, light. 

“I love you,” Tyler says. 

Now comes the hard part. Now they learn to live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who stuck with this, who gave me your comments and support. It really means a lot.

**Author's Note:**

> Zombie violence  
> On-screen graphic death of two kids  
> Animal death (Marshall does not die)  
> Off-screen suicide  
> Off-screen murder of a child  
> Off-screen rape/assault/violence  
> Homophobic language  
> Body shaming against someone with body-image issues  
> (I may add to this list as I re-read the work)


End file.
